EVERYONE HERE SPOKE SIGN LANGUAGE [Kindle Edition]
Author: Nora Ellen GROCE John W. M. Whiting | Language: English | ISBN: B002JCTI3W | Format: PDF, EPUB
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From the seventeenth century to the early years of the twentieth, the population of Martha's Vineyard manifested an extremely high rate of profound hereditary deafness. In stark contrast to the experience of most deaf people in our own society, the Vineyarders who were born deaf were so thoroughly integrated into the daily life of the community that they were not seen--and did not see themselves--as handicapped or as a group apart. Deaf people were included in all aspects of life, such as town politics, jobs, church affairs, and social life. How was this possible?
On the Vineyard, hearing and deaf islanders alike grew up speaking sign language. This unique sociolinguistic adaptation meant that the usual barriers to communication between the hearing and the deaf, which so isolate many deaf people today, did not exist.
- File Size: 2094 KB
- Print Length: 169 pages
- Publisher: Harvard University Press (June 30, 2009)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B002JCTI3W
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #269,280 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #29 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Politics & Social Sciences > Social Sciences > Special Groups > Disabled
- #93 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Politics & Social Sciences > Politics & Government > Public Affairs & Policy > Social Services & Welfare
This is one of my favorite books of all time. Originally written as an ethnographic study, it is also completely readable for a non-professional popular audience. Basically, it is the story of the islanders of Martha's Vineyard, a large island off the coast of Massachusetts. The islanders originally came from the same 2 or 3 boatloads of colonists from England, by way of Boston and Scituate, from a region in Kent which already seems to have had a high incidence of hereditary deafness. Due to the geographic isolation of the island, recessive genes for deafness, which were already prominent in the original Kentish colonists, came increasingly to the fore. As the proportions of islanders who happened to be deaf gradually increased, what was the islanders' answer? Not shunning the deaf. Far from it. Rather, a tradition arose that EVERYONE on the island, deaf or hearing, simply learned sign language as children!
This book is full of fascinating little anecdotes, about how island society worked to include its deaf members. For example, we learn about families and friends, some deaf and some hearing, who would regularly sit next to each other in church. The hearing members would sign the sermons to their deaf friends. Or, sometimes groups of people who could hear perfectly well might be together, for whatever reason, and they might happen to converse by signing just as much as in spoken English. Everyone spoke both languages.
Some of my favorite parts of the book focus on the benefits of signing. For example, perhaps two neighbors wanted to converse, while being separated by 200 yards of noisy space, made vocally impenetrable by sounds of surf and sea.
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