BSL in its Social Context
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BSL in its Social Context
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Session 10: Language
Planning and Standardisation
External changes to
languages can occur as a result of deliberate changes.
One possibility is that adults cause the change deliberately. Adults may use, and teach, the language the way
they think it should be used rather than the way
they naturally use it. Some BSL teachers
teach BSL that they never use, because they believe it should be like that. One of the causes of
change in sign languages has been language planning.
Language planning happens when a person, or group of people sets out to make
formal changes to language use. It is very
common in spoken languages. Modern Hebrew was
formally written and taught to people by a committee; modern Norwegian was written
initially by one person (Have a look at the story that was explained to us by Christina
Kryvi, a Norwegian students here at the Centre). Portuguese was "tidied" up in
the 1950s to make it more regular. German has
recently had some changes made to it. India made a deliberate decision to introduce Hindi
as a national language after independence. Ever
since public education of deaf people has existed, hearing people have attempted to alter
the language used by deaf people. Wardhaugh
and Fasold (both on your reading list) discuss language planning in some detail. Even the great sign
language enthusiasts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as the Abbe de
L'Epee in France, and Thomas and Edward Gallaudet in America tried to alter the
"natural signs" of the deaf children they taught, to match the structure of the
spoken language of the country. This is all
part of language planning. Unfortunately for the
language planners, the changes have not been as great as they'd have liked. Hearing people often try and invent new signs or
sign systems for deaf people (e.g. new fingerspelling alphabets or whole new languages
e.g. Paget Gorman or Seeing Essential English etc) but these have never been totally
accepted.
However, the planners
may introduce things that do become part of the sign languages and this causes some minor
changes. For example, the sign from Paget
Gorman for an animal is now used by some BSL signers as the sign ANIMAL. Other signers use this "animal" sign to
mean PAGET GORMAN itself, because the sign is so particularly memorable. Standardisation
Another cause of
language change is standardisation. The
standard form of a language is the one used by the educated elite of the language
community and so it has high prestige. It
cuts across regional differences and is an institutionalised norm which can be used in the
mass-media, to teach foreigners, etc. It is
usually the form of the language that is written, and has grammars and is found in the
dictionary. Once it has developed it changes
very slowly. It is by no means clear
that there is a standard form of BSL. Standard
English is the language used by the social elite, and is not regionally identifiable. The BSL of the social elite, however, is
regionally marked. Standard English is the
dialect that is taught to second language learners of English; learners of BSL learn local
dialects of BSL. Standard English is written,
taught in schools and is validated by being preserved in a dictionary (any words from
non-standard forms of English that do make it into dictionaries are clearly marked as
being non-standard). However, there is no
written form of BSL, BSL has only recently been taught again in schools, and is not always
taught by native users. The BSL/English
dictionary has only recently been published and only contains a limited number of signs. Standard English is used on television and radio
and by government organisations. BSL on
television is not standard and deaf television presenters use different regional signs. Despite these major differences, there is no doubt
that British deaf people recognise BSL as one language.
We have seen that there are certain signs that are accepted as being those
one uses across regions. It is possible that
some form of Standard BSL is slowly emerging, but with the social context of BSL being so
different from that of English, there is no certainty of the form it will take.
[The “old” words in English are all from
British English. The “new” words
have all been borrowed from America] Language
death and language birth
So far we have talked
about relatively small changes in languages. However,
there can be very major changes in a language too. Most
dramatic changes occur when a language dies and when a new language is born. Language
death
Languages are dying at a
great rate at the moment. Langauges die for
two main reasons: either the speakers all die or they stop speaking the language and start
speaking another one. All the speakers dying
may sound very drastic, especially if you think of English. Probably about 200 million
people would need to die before English was even mildly threatened and even then the
language would live on in its written form. However,
this can happen with very small communities, because of war, natural disaster or disease. For example, the Easter Islanders all died after
an outbreak of small pox in the last century, and their language died with them. There are plenty of examples of peoples who were
killed either by wars or diseases when the Europeans colonised the Americas, Africa and
Australasia. Much more common today is
that the children of speakers of a certain language do not learn that language, but learn
another one instead. Then, when the parents’
generation dies, the language quietly dies with it. This
happened in England when the Cornish language died in the eighteenth century. There wasn’t some drastic event that killed
all the Cornish speakers in Cornwall in one go. Instead,
more and more people spoke English and fewer and fewer people spoke Cornish, until there
was only one speaker left. When she died,
Cornish died. This same pattern is very
common, now as speakers of minority languages learn more powerful languages (which are
really more use to them, at least economically) instead of the languages of their
ancestors. Interestingly, attempts
to kill languages are rarely successful. “Death
by neglect” is much more common than “murder”. Users of a language that is healthy will do
everything they can to keep it going when it is persecuted.
For example, the Basque and Catalan languages in Spain under Franco's rule,
or Welsh in the last century were all persecuted languages but their speakers kept them
going determinedly. It is unlikely that BSL
will be "murdered". For a long
time, hearing people (and some deaf people!) have tried to prevent deaf people from using
sign languages, but the deaf community has fought hard to preserve the language, just as
the Basques and Welsh did. At present, with
increased acceptance of BSL in schools, on television, and in the work-place, with more
hearing people (including parents of deaf children) learning BSL, I think we are safe to
say BSL is too strong to be "killed off". However,
some deaf people are worried that sign languages could die from neglect. Nobody really expects every signer of BSL to drop
dead overnight, but there is a fear that if BSL is not looked after properly, new
generations will not learn it, but will learn English instead, so the language will die. This is an argument that is sometimes used against
cochlear implantation of deaf children, and against mainstreaming. In another way, all
languages die as a part of their process of change.
You are not the same person that you were when you were born. All the cells in your body have died and been
replaced over the years. You haven't noticed
this because it has happened very gradually, and a bit at a time, and there was no big
moment when all the cells died and were replaced by new ones. In one way, you are still the same person that you
were at birth, but physically you are not. In
the same way, we can say that an old language is totally dead, if it has evolved into
something new. Nobody today speaks Latin, or
Old English. These are both "dead
languages". However, neither of these
ever really died in a dramatic sense; they just changed slowly over the years until the
new language was so different from the old one that the old one was finally declared
"dead". Old English gradually
changed until we got Modern English and Latin is now alive and well but called Italian or
Spanish or Portuguese or Romanian (and some other names).
If we follow this argument, we have to say that the BSL that we know today
will probably "die" because no-one will understand or use the language that we
use in the 1990s. But, perhaps in 1,000 years
time, sign language users will be able to look back at the BSL of today, and see how it
came to produce their language. Language Birth We have seen that languages can die, and also that language death is part of a natural "life cycle" process of languages, because languages are also born. There is the slow, undramatic development of a language, as we see in English, or BSL today. There are also moments of language birth that are much quicker (and more exciting), but linguistics doesn't always recognise them, because linguists can't always tell when something is a new language and when its just a dialect variation of the old language. For this reason, many linguists will tell you that languages are dying out today, faster than ever before, and soon there will only be a few languages in the world. True, many African, Australian and Asian languages are disappearing, but languages are diversifying too. One of the main sources of new languages are pidgins and creoles, which arise out of "lingua francas". People speaking different
languages often meet. When they do, there are
several ways they can understand each other. One
of them might speak the other's language as well eg British person knows ASL and BSL and
meets an American who only knows ASL, then they use ASL.
Or might use an interpreter who knows both languages. Or they might use a 3rd language they both know. eg Irish person meets
Portuguese; Irish knows no Portuguese and the Portuguese knows no English, but they both
know Greek, so they speak Greek. ie Greek is
the Lingua Franca. Lingua Franca is one
language used by people who all know different languages.
It often is not the native language of any of the people involved. It can be any language. That is, a lingua franca is a role that any
language can play. Lingua Franca may serve
very small groups eg Bristol University, or it may be on a national level eg in USA
everyone speaks English so immigrants learn English, or on a world level eg almost
everywhere you go in the world, you will find someone who can speak a little bit of
English. There are 3 main
possibilities a) It might be a language
that some people have as a native language. eg The reason it is called Lingua Franca is because
in the middle ages, Provencal French was used by many people in Europe when they traded
(Franca=French). Sometimes it becomes a
native language eg Swahili was a lingua franca, but is now a native lang. In the old Soviet Union, Russian was a lingua
franca. Today English is increasingly being
used as lingua franca around the world. b) It might be a language that no-one uses any more. For a long time, Latin was a lingua franca in
Europe, even after there were no communities left who used it everyday. c) It might be a made up language, made specially to
be a lingua franca. Making up languages was
big business in 19th Century Europe. In spoken languages, the most famous one is
Esperanto. The aim was to make it the second
language of European civilisation - it never really was to be global because it was based
on Latin and German words and grammar, so other languages eg Chinese or Tagalog were
nothing like it. It has become quite
widespread, but has never fulfilled all the promises that its maker (and his followers)
hoped for. Esperanto still struggles on and
there are hundreds of thousands of people who know it, but it will never become a world
lingua franca. In USA, the Indians used
to use a sign lingua franca called Plains sign language.
Used it when tribes met. Some
white people thought it was universal and took Indians to meet deaf children. Gestuno, is an artificial
lingua franca. It was made up. It can be thought of as a "new
language". It was designed by WFD for
deaf people who met at international conferences. It
was largely based on ASL and uses the ASL alphabet. It
is only a collection of vocabulary, which is based on spoken language words, and the
translations are given in only a few western European languages and there is no grammar. There are only 1,500 signs in it. The signs are for business meetings only, not for
social purposes. It is listed in a book, but
is not widely used by deaf people. Very few
deaf know it. At the WFD conference in
Bulgaria in 1979 WFD trained an interpreter in it, and no-one understood because no-one
else knew it, and there was no facial expression, or anything, and the interpreter used
Bulgarian word order. Why has it failed? Gestuno was designed as
an artificial alternative language and had all the problems to overcome that Esperanto
had. It also wasn't really needed, because
signers can also make use of International Signing. International
signing is not a true "lingua franca" because it is not (yet) a discrete
language, but a mixture of languages. In
fact, it doesn't really make sense to call international signing one language, but perhaps
more a way of signing. When deaf people from foreign countries meet, they
sign in a certain way, but the vocabulary is often very different, depending on what
country they're from, and what languages they know. Perhaps
in time, the International signing that European Deaf people use when they meet will
become fixed and known as "European International Sign Language". If that happens, we will have a new sign
language. People have often said
that international signing is a pidgin. Let's
consider pidgins and see if international sign is a pidgin. Pidgins are languages
that develop when people with two or more languages come into contact and do not already
have a language that can work as a lingua franca. When
this happens, a new language develops that has features of the parent languages. The pidgin then acts as a
Lingua Franca. All pidgins are (or were)
Lingua Francas, although not all Lingua Francas are pidgins. Pidgins have special
linguistic features and sociolinguistic features. You
cannot define a pidgin by one particular feature, but if it fulfils enough of the points,
you can say it is a pidgin. People used to say that
sign languages were pidgins, by which they meant that they were impoverished languages,
that is, had small vocabularies and very basic grammar (oops!). They did not look at the sociolinguistic contexts
and they did not really know what they were looking at anyway! All they were doing was trying to compare what
they understood with the spoken language that they knew.
This was not a scientific approach, and left sign languages with a bad name,
for no good reason. International sign can be
seen to be a pidgin for many reasons. It is
not one language ie it is not something that can really be linguistically defined and many
international signing conversations would be unintelligible to other signers who use some
form of international singing themselves, but it arises in a given sociolinguistic
situation. The international sign used by
European deaf is different from that used by deaf in the middle east. In Scandinavia, deaf use a sign language together
that has signs from all the Scandinavian sign languages.
This may be a lingua franca because it is a well-established language, with
related parent languages. What is international
sign? lexicon (vocabulary) may be: 1) mime, 2) international gestures
that everyone knows, and maybe borrowed from another language or maybe not 3) signs made up for that
encounter only and with meaning only for that context. Signs are related to
culture of the people involved eg DOG does it bite or is it a pet? How do you point to someone without offending them
because of their culture etc. Many signs are already
often similar because some sign languages are related.
Often the person using international sign uses high % of their own language
sign. eg Bencie Woll's study (in the reference list) found up to 70% of signs by BSL user
were BSL signs. Can use own sign with
mime or several varieties of own, including ones that feel most iconic, or own sign and
sign from another language. Or paraphrase new
ideas or terminology. The grammar is often very
similar. This might be because of: a) Historical links?
b) Contact between sign
languages? (note: in Woll's study, the person
who found it hardest was from Asia, also ASL signers, but Europeans found it easiest) c) Natural sign language
grammar because of space the way space is used in a visual medium? (note: people with good
English and not Strong deaf signing found this harder than people who used strong deaf
signing, with all the visual grammar). d) Is it a reduction to
basic universals of language? (like we see in Creoles) There has been a lot of
debate about whether there is something called "pidgin sign English" - this
would occur when someone knowing no signs met someone knowing no English. This pure situation is unlikely if the signer is a
mentally competent adult that it is hardly worth considering. Woodward (1973) said it
should be PSE because it showed linguistic features of some pidgins eg "loss" of
inflections, and using grammatical structure of one language and the vocabulary of
another. But really, he did his research on
all sorts of signers (deaf and hearing) and didn't really know what he was looking at! We will look at this more in the next session when
we look at the outcome of language contact. Usually pidgins don't
live long and people adopt another language. But
sometimes something else grow out of them. eg
In 1066 the Normans spoke Norse French and the English spoke Old English, so a pidgin
arose, and the ancestor of Modern English developed.
Some people say this was a Creole. Definitions of Creoles
are even harder than pidgins, but one very strict definition is that Creoles are pidgins
which are someone's first language. ie there
are native Creole users, but no native pidgin users. Parents may use pidgin
together, or at least it is around in the language community, but children growing up
surrounded by it change it and enrich it and apply their own linguistic rules. Part of the definition is purely social: if
children grow up speaking it as their first language, it is a Creole, even if it doesn't
look much different from some established pidgins. (Note,
it is possible for a pidgin to continue for many generations, so long as users have
another native language, it does not become a Creole automatically) There have been
suggestions that sign languages are Creoles. Fischer
(1978) suggested ASL was a Creole. She said
it was a mixture of Old French sign language and the sign language that was in America
before Gallaudet and Clerc arrived. Another possibility is
that, maybe deaf children of hearing parents use a Creole.
Maybe their parents or teachers learn a pidgin and as they grow up, they
creolise it. There is then a continuum
between this creolised sign language and the established sign language that deaf families
pass down the generations. Sign languages do have
many features like Creoles but many of these features are social similarities like low
status. Fischer describes a language called
ZZZ, and you think she is talking about ASL, but then you realise she means Haitian
Creole. The most exciting
recent development in the area of language birth recently has been the description of the
birth of an entire sign language in Nicaragua.
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