BSL in its Social Context
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BSL in its Social Context
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Session 6: Class & Gender
We will now begin
considering social variations in BSL. In
spoken languages, linguists generally expect to find differences according to different
social groups within the language community. We
can expect possible differences according to the social class of the speaker, their age,
their sex, their ethnic identity, their religious identity, and any bilingual situations
they might live in. We will look at all these
for BSL. The issue here is not to
"teach" different dialect signs, but rather to discuss the trends and features
we know about, and to consider why they arise. Social Class Sign linguists need to
ask if there is a class distinction in Sign Languages.
In order to be able to answer this, we need to decide what we mean by class. In English, decisions are based upon the income of
a person, their educational background and the family they come from. Any sociolinguistics text
book will tell you about social class variants in British English, and we will not go into
them here. Have a look at Holmes or
Wardhaugh, or Trudgill (all on your reading list), or any other book you fancy. There is no reason,
though, why "social class" should have the same defining points for British deaf
people as hearing people, when it comes to language.
Research has shown that deaf people are more likely to have unskilled and
semi-skilled jobs than hearing people, so income is not necessarily a good guideline to
dialects. Few members of the deaf community
have been able to go to university until very recently, so there is not the same immediate
parallel here with hearing people. In
American deaf society, however, there is a recognised "social class" of deaf
people who have been to Gallaudet. In
Britain, it is possible that the educated elite should be those who attended Mary Hare. There has been no formal research into the BSL of
Mary Hare alumni. The most noticeable
"social class" distinction in BSL can be based upon family background, depending
on whether the signer is from a hearing or a deaf family.
Those born to deaf parents are more likely (although by no means certainly)
to have an early exposure to a good model of adult BSL.
Those born to hearing parents often (although, again, by no means always)
only learn BSL when they start school, or even when they leave school. Consequently, those deaf people coming from deaf
families are seen as members of a linguistic elite, and we can see evidence of language
differences in these groups. Research by
Linda Day on adult signers from deaf and hearing families has shown that their signing
differs greatly, with deaf signers from deaf families using parts of BSL such as space,
mouth patterns and proforms differently from those from hearing families. Class in hearing
community may also have some effect upon BSL, as there are also those who had concerned,
educated middle-class parents who tried very hard to teach their children spoken or sign
language. Idiolects of those
deprived of BSL An idiolect is the
particular language used by one person. We
all have our own idiolects, and each one is subtly different. For most people, though, the differences are
easily understood by other users of the language. However,
we need to remember that there are some deaf people who never come into contact with other
BSL users. There are many children, for
example, who have to develop home signing because they have no signing adult role models. However, most of them
either learn some BSL later or grow up to use English.
There are some deaf adults who never come into contact with other deaf
adults or the only deaf adults they know also do not know any BSL. This is particularly true for those who live in
institutions, particularly mental health institutions.
They may develop fairly complex signing systems, although we would probably
not want to say that these are part of BSL. However,
if we say that we are interested in looking at the influence of society upon the language
of British deaf people, then we do need to acknowledge this group of people. Men and Women's Dialect In most languages women
also seem to use language a bit differently from men.
There has been a great deal of research in this, especially in the last 30
years. Again, the extent and type of
difference is different in different languages. Again,
too, the important question is WHY the difference should occur.
Theories to explain
differences in English-speaking men and women can focus on the different social status of
men and women (women traditionally having a lower social status). Alternatively, they can focus on the different
social roles of men and women (women traditionally having a more caring role in society
and men being more prone to confrontation and assertion) or the different aims of the
conversation (women using language particularly to construct friendships more than men
do). Although there is
something useful in many of these theories, the differences described between men and
women in English are relatively small. Only
very rarely do they result in a complete breakdown in communication between the sexes.
We do need to be aware,
however, that the topics discussed by the sexes are different. Research done here at Bristol found that young
deaf men and women discussed different topics when they were in casual conversation. This
led to a use of different vocabulary. For
example, the young men talked about football for much of the time. The young women might have known the vocabulary
for football discussion but they did not have cause to use it. This is an important issue
for language learners who might not know vocabulary for topics that are regularly
discussed by members of the opposite sex. Turn-taking is also
different in men and women signers. The
function of apparent “interruptions” might be different. In women’s talk, the
“interruptions” are not really a challenge to take the floor but a supportive
reinforcement of what another person has said. This
is less common with men’s talk. The men
do support each other in conversation, but in different ways. The women in this study also provided much more
feedback (also known as “back-channel” responses) than the men. In some sign languages
the differences between men and women's signing are very great, to the extent of mutual
intelligibility. This is not the case in BSL,
where the lexical differences in the language of men and women are as slight if not more
so as they are in English. One theory has
proposed that this is because most teachers working with deaf children in primary schools
are women and they may be the major source of sign for both boys and girls, so that boys
do not have adult male sign role-models at an early age.
Whether or not there is anything in this theory, there are certainly plenty
of stories of hearing men signing "feminine" forms of sign languages because
they were taught only by female sign teachers. This
is one good reason why sign tutors need to be aware of sign differences between the sexes. In Ireland, however,
there has been a bigger difference than in Britain because the education system was
different. This is also true in Belgium, and
a lot of Catholic countries where boys and girls are educated separately. Le Master and Dwyer found
very great differences in the two dialects of Dublin deaf men and women. The two schools of St. Mary's and St. Joseph's
used totally different sign vocabulary, to the extent of being unintelligible. When the deaf people left school, they had to
learn the different signs to be able to communicate with the opposite sex. The girls tended to adopt the boy's signing,
though, rather than the other way. This arose
because the girls’ school stopped using signing and began an oral regime ten years
before the boys’ school. For ten years,
the only access to signing was through the boys. The
strict segregation between the schools no longer exists, but knowledge of the two forms of
ISL still persists. Pat Matthews in Ireland
has described some of the differences between male and female signing in ISL. It is important to
realise that these differences are not directly because the signers are male or female. They happened because of the way that one society
treated boys and girls differently. |
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