BSL in its Social Context
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BSL in its Social Context
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Session 8: Age
Age Dialect The form of a language
also varies according to the age of the person. Young
people tend to be the innovators of language change.
This is true in spoken languages, but there are many things that mark older
and younger signers too. It is important to ask why the language varies.
In spoken English, the
reasons for difference between speakers of different ages are not hugely important, and
the differences between the two generations are fairly small. They are often limited to slang, and to words that
have currency in the person's youth and then lose currency but are retained by the older
people. For example, some older people in
England still talk about the "gramophone" and "wireless", while
younger people would not. On the whole
though, there is a reasonable ease of communication between the two generations. The main difference here, then, comes from
historical reasons. However, sometimes we
might think that an old person is speaking inappropriately if they use a “young
person’s” word. Identity is also
important here. Younger people will start to
use words that show that they are different from their parents’ generation. It is a sign that they are independent and can
make their own way in the world. There is a
pattern in age dialects that show that younger people’s dialect differs quite
considerably from older people’s but that as they get older and “settle down”
their dialect becomes more standard again. In sign languages the
differences are often far greater than in powerful "stable" languages such as
English, especially because of the breaks in passing the language down through the
generations. Some young deaf people claim
that they cannot understand the signing of older deaf people. It is possible that a deaf person of 15 will have
very great difficulty in understanding the signing of someone in their eighties, and vice
versa. We should bear in mind that this sort
of language breakdown is seen in many “threatened” languages in the world. Older and younger generations of the same family
can be cut off from each other linguistically for several reasons. BSL is not threatened in the same way, though. Again, young deaf people
have the same natural tendency as young hearing people to create their own identity, that
is different from their parents’ generation. There
might also be a physical difference. For
example, you may well see that older people use a smaller signing space than younger
people. Is this because older people find it
less comfortable to move their arms in a large area? As a very broad
generalisation, older deaf people (for example, those over 70) often use very much more
fingerspelling and many fewer English mouth patterns than younger deaf people. The overall size of signs used by older people is
also usually smaller. Many younger deaf
people (for example those under twenty) use a form of BSL that is more heavily influenced
by English grammar, and use relatively little fingerspelling. Their signs are often bigger
than similar signs used by older signers. Signers
from different age groups also use different signs to refer to the same objects. Many of the differences
we see in the signing of deaf signers of different ages are due to three major factors. Firstly, as we have seen, there are few signing
deaf parents of deaf children. This means
that parents cannot pass the same language on to their children. This break between generations makes for very
large changes in the language between generations. Secondly educational
changes have had a very large impact on the signing of deaf people. This is part of the overall concept of “language
planning” that we will discuss later in the course.
Before the 1940s, English was taught through lip-reading and fingerspelling,
with the result that the fingerspelling of older deaf people is fluent and a dominant
feature of their signing. Since the 1940s,
the improvements in technology have meant that deaf people can have been expected to use
more of their residual hearing to listen to and learn English. Because most schools were residential, deaf
children signed together. We know that since
the 1970s that there have been increasingly tolerant attitudes towards some use of sign in
the class room, and most recently even of BSL. At
the same time, residential schools have been closing down and deaf schools have been
closed as more deaf children are sent to local mainstream schools. Whatever the effect of this,
educationally, we have lost a relatively large signing community of children. It remains to be seen what effect this will have
upon the BSL of young people. This is part of
the excitement of sociolinguistics: seeing what will happen next. A third reason for age
differences in BSL is change in technology. In
linguistics last year, we talked about the way that many signs in BSL reflect some aspect
of the appearance of items, or the way they are used.
As technology has changed, so have signs changed, to reflect the new
appearances or means of operating or handling new appliances. The BSL sign TELEPHONE has changed over time as
the telephone has gone from an appliance held in both hands, to one held in one hand, to
one that has an aerial and is held in the palm of the hand, rather than being gripped. Similar changes may be seen in signs such as
TRAIN, CAMERA and WATCH (the time piece) where technology has changed greatly over the
last 70 or 80 years. This same pattern is
seen in other sign languages, as well as BSL. Old signs also die out. For example, signs such as PAWN-BROKER and ALMS
are no longer in widespread use, although they are given in a very basic list of signs
from 100 years ago. Young people today would
not need signs for these ideas, but would need signs such as FAX, LOTTERY or LASER to
refer to new inventions. The American linguist
Robin Battison claimed that most fingerspelling innovations came from younger people. In Britain now, we can see younger people making
changes to the manual alphabet, especially in the letters L, I and O.
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