The SAGE Deaf Studies

Encyclopedia
Signing Communities

Contributors: Annelies Kusters

Edited by: Genie Gertz & Patrick Boudreault
Book Title: The SAGE Deaf Studies Encyclopedia
Chapter Title: "Signing Communities"
Pub. Date: 2016
Access Date: March 30, 2016
Publishing Company: SAGE Publications, Inc
City: Thousand Oaks
Print ISBN: 9781452259567
Online ISBN: 9781483346489
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781483346489.n284
Print pages: 888-890
©2016 SAGE Publications, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the
pagination of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.
SAGE SAGE Reference
Contact SAGE Publications at http://www.sagepub.com.[Page iv]

In the context of this entry, signing communities are defined as communities where
Deaf people use sign language to communicate with either hearing or deaf co-
inhabitants. Such places (whether real or imagined) are regarded as different from the
mainstream where deaf people mostly are surrounded by hearing nonsigning people in
their families, schools, and workplaces. Examples in which signing communities have
been envisaged or planned such as Flournoy’s commonwealth and Laurent, South
Dakota, are discussed. However, as these attempts were not successful, first and
foremost, the focus is on real-life situations in which a majority (or at least a very large
number of people) know and use sign language: shared signing communities.

Shared signing communities are villages, towns, or groups in which, because of the
historical presence of a hereditary form of deafness that is circulated in the
communities through endogamous marriages, a relatively high number of deaf people
have lived together with hearing people for decades or even centuries. Over the years,
the need to communicate with one another in the dense sociocultural networks of these
communities has led to the emergence of local sign languages used by both deaf and
hearing people, which are also called shared sign languages.

Probably the most well-known shared signing community was located on Martha’s
Vineyard, an island off Cape Cod, Massachusetts, renowned as a place where
“everyone spoke sign language” for several hundred years until the early 1950s.
Because of a pattern of genetic deafness, circulated through endogamous marriage
practices, the rate of deafness on this island averaged 1:155 and peaked at 1:4 in a
neighborhood in the town of Chilmark. The community featured a dense social and kin
network, and this close contact between deaf and hearing people resulted in the
evolution of a sign language that was widely used by both deaf and hearing people in a
number of villages on the island on a daily basis, down the generations. Changes in
marriage patterns, due to processes of immigration and emigration of both deaf and
hearing people, led to the result that deafness on the island died out.

Martha’s Vineyard became a particularly powerful part of the collective memory of the
international Deaf community. When its story is recounted, it often sounds like a
paradise for Deaf people, who are disappointed when they learn that this “dream”
ceased to exist after the mid-20th century. The reason that Deaf people tend to see this
place as utopia is because Western societies have struggled for a long time to achieve
successful inclusion of deaf people within mainstream society. The reality for the
majority of signing Deaf people is growing up in hearing nonsigning families, having
hearing nonsigning teachers and colleagues, and having to comply with a hearing
nonsigning society. Signing Deaf people have therefore been described as constituting
a geographical diaspora, yearning to be together and to use sign language whenever
they want to, leading them to imagine ideal places where this is possible.

In addition to recalling and retelling the history of Martha’s Vineyard, there are many
examples of fairy tales and fantasy stories in which Deaf people imagine such ideal
worlds. Examples are tales in which the roles are reversed, such as in Eyeth, the story
about a planet called Eyeth, where Deaf signing people constitute the dominant
majority and hearing speaking people the oppressed minority. Other stories fantasize
about determined efforts to create such a Deaf majority: In his satirical book Islay,
Douglas Bullard writes about the attempts of a deaf man called Sulla to take over a
small state in order to constitute a deaf majority there, with the aim of living in harmony

Page 1 of 4 The SAGE Deaf Studies Encyclopedia

SAGE SAGE Reference
Contact SAGE Publications at http://www.sagepub.com.[Page iv]
with a hearing minority.

Such ideas have not been confined to the realms of story or fantasy alone: Sometimes,
actual plans were devised. A well-known and classic example is John Flournoy’s idea
to establish a Deaf commonwealth, a state with its own government where all the
citizens would be Deaf (and where not even hearing signing people would be
welcome). The aim was self-determination and the possibility for deaf people to occupy
high positions. In 1855, Flournoy issued a circular about his idea. Later, conversations
between Flournoy and William Turner, the hearing principal of the Connecticut Asylum
(at Hartford) for the Education and Instruction of Deaf and Dumb Persons, and between
Flournoy and Edmund Booth, a deaf person, were published in American Annals of the
Deaf, and were widely spread in the United States. Booth was strongly critical of
Flournoy’s idea, arguing that a Deaf commonwealth would consist of mostly half-
educated people and that deaf people would do better when they lived among hearing
people. In 1858, Laurent Clerc commented on the idea. Although Clerc earlier had
uttered similar ideas of deaf people occupying a state of their own, he came back on
those, stating that exclusiveness was undesirable. Flournoy’s ideas generally received
cool reactions from successful deaf people, and he could not assemble enough
followers.

Similar separatist plans were discussed in British and French deaf communities. For
example, in the early 1880s, the English Jane Elizabeth Groom proposed to politicians
and financiers that they colonize land in Canada for deaf people. Her argument was that
deaf people were disadvantaged in the tight English labor market. The community she
envisaged was not to be composed exclusively of deaf people, and her plan was not
self-determination for deaf people but welfare, by moving to a place with little economic
competition. Groups of deaf people moved to Canada in 1884 and 1885, took
employment as farmers, and brought their relatives over.

A more recent example is the plan to establish a town for sign language users in South
Dakota called Laurent (after Laurent Clerc, who ironically was against such plans, as
explained earlier). The aim was that people would start moving there in 2008. The
project was led by Marvin T. Miller, a Deaf journalist, and his hearing mother-in-law M.
E. Barwacz. The idea was to establish a place where everyone used sign language and
where the built environment would be suitable for deaf people, such as extra lights on
emergency vehicles, and buildings with a lot of glass to enhance visibility. Plans started
in 2004, but a few years later the project went bankrupt, apparently because the main
investor pulled out. The ideas to establish Laurent elicited heavy discussion in the
United States: Arguments against the project included that deaf people should be as
much as possible a part of the world around them, not isolate themselves. Arguments in
favor of the project were that Laurent was devised not as a deaf town but as a deaf-
friendly town where all sign language users are welcome, and a place for collaboration
between sign language users, including hearing parents with deaf children.

Martha’s Vineyard and other shared signing communities are different from all of these
imagined examples: They are neither immigrant colonies, such as a Chinatown or Little
Italy, nor separatist groups, such as the Amish. Instead, they are places where, even
though deaf people have constituted a minority rather than a majority, sign language
has been an integral part of the local linguistic mosaic. These situations evolved
spontaneously and naturally, rather than in an imagined or planned way.

Page 2 of 4 The SAGE Deaf Studies Encyclopedia

SAGE SAGE Reference
Contact SAGE Publications at http://www.sagepub.com.[Page iv]
The best-documented contemporary examples are the Al-Sayyid Bedouin in Israel,
Desa Kolok (Bengkala) in Bali, Chican in Mexico, Ban Khor in Thailand, and
Adamorobe in Ghana. The normal ratio of babies born deaf in the West is about 0.1
percent, although this is generally reported to be 2 to 5 times higher in developing
countries. The percentage of deaf inhabitants in the abovementioned shared signing
communities varies between 0.58 percent and 3.25 percent and has decreased over
time, especially in places featured by rapid immigration. However, the exact (relative or
absolute) numbers of deaf people in such communities do not say much in themselves.

Rather than a particular percentage of deaf people in a community, it is the

communities’ social atmosphere that creates the possibility for a shared sign language
to emerge and to be spread and passed on throughout a community, especially when
the deafness exists for a number of generations. Endogamous marriage practices are
associated with a dense social and kin organization and collective culture (and not
necessarily with geographical isolation, as many authors on shared signing
communities have assumed). In these contexts, deaf and hearing people do (or did in
the past) to a large extent the same things in daily life and frequently engage in common
activities. They are therefore likely to have considerable contact with each other, and a
shared sign language thus could evolve and be circulated widely throughout the
communities, and be transmitted down through the generations. There is typically only a
small minority of deaf signers and a large majority of hearing signers.

Researchers have argued that the use of shared sign languages facilitates deaf
people’s integration; however, a more adequate choice of words is to describe shared
signing communities as cohesive communities where the fact that deaf and hearing
people live together is integral to these people’s everyday lives. This does not
necessarily imply that deaf people in shared signing communities are included in every
aspect of the village’s public, political, and religious life, which is seldom the case.
There is considerable variation within and between shared signing communities with
regard to rates of sign language proficiency, use, and translation during events; deaf
people’s marriage rates; deaf people’s participation in village economies and politics;
and the role and results of (deaf) education.

The deaf-inclusive situation in shared signing communities is challenged by

developments such as urbanization, capitalism, the switch from subsistence economies
to cash economies, migration, diversification of employment, and increased rates of
formal (deaf) education. It appears that these processes have the potential to place
deaf people in shared signing communities in disadvantaged or even marginal
positions. In addition, many shared sign languages are on the brink of extinction, mostly
because of contact with larger, urban (often national) sign languages. Still, even if there
are oppressive and marginalizing discourses, practices, and processes present, the
very existence of shared signing communities highlights particular practices and ideas
that seem to be utopian for many deaf people, such as the practice of using sign
language automatically with a deaf person, the commonsense nature of the knowledge
that one can discuss everything in sign language, and the fact of being born deaf in a
community where deaf people of various ages have been living for decades, if not
centuries.

Annelies Kusters

See also Deaf History: 1800–1880; Deaf History: 1880–1920; Deaf Studies; Genetics

Page 3 of 4 The SAGE Deaf Studies Encyclopedia

SAGE SAGE Reference
Contact SAGE Publications at http://www.sagepub.com.[Page iv]
and Heredity; Genetics: Connexin 26 and Connexin 30; International Signs;
Multilingualism; Nativism; Sociolinguistics: Dialects, Regionalisms, and Ethnic;
Varieties

Further Readings

Groce, N. (1985). Everyone here spoke sign language: Hereditary deafness on

Martha’s Vineyard. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Krentz, C. A. (2000). Mighty change: An anthology of Deaf American writing, 1816–

1864. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press.

Kusters, A. (2010). Deaf utopias? Reviewing the sociocultural literature on the world’s
“Martha’s Vineyard situations.” Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, 15(1), 3–
16.

Van Cleve, J. V., & Crouch, B. A. (1989). A place of their own: Creating the Deaf
community in America. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press.

Zeshan, U., & de Vos, C. (2012). Sign languages in village communities:

Anthropological and linguistic insights. Berlin, Germany: Mouton de Gruyter & Ishara.

Annelies Kusters
http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781483346489.n284
10.4135/9781483346489.n284

Page 4 of 4 The SAGE Deaf Studies Encyclopedia