Language and Humor Blog

Deaf Inuit of Nunavut, a territory in northern Canada, got together recently along with family, friends, and professionals for a focus group (http://www.nunatsiaq.com/news/nunavut/60721_10.html) [EDIT (3/26/2010): dead link].

It’s interesting that “one in 1,000 Inuit is deaf, and a high number are hearing impaired.” I wonder how many are hearing impaired; one deaf person in 1,000 people out of the territory’s “approximately 29,500 residents” (http://www.gov.nu.ca/Nunavut/) [EDIT (3/26/2010): dead link] (not all of whom are Inuit) would be fewer than thirty deaf people.

I also wonder if these “dialects” of Inuit Sign Language are actually dialects (such as California American Sign Language versus New York American Sign Language), or if they are unrelated and low-grammar gestures created by individuals to communicate within their families and communities (“home signs”) plus signs like hearing Native American gestures that communicate basic information across cultures.

American Sign Language

American Sign Language (ASL), used in the United States and Canada (Quebec has Langue des signes québécoise), evolved out of the brains and interaction of deaf youngsters at America’s first permanent school for the deaf, the American School for the Deaf in Connecticut (in 1817). Students from all over the United States came together for the first time and brought their local sign languages, some of which may have included some Native American gestures, and home signs. These combined with the French Sign Language (and manually coded English adapted from manually coded French) brought over from France with deaf teacher of the deaf Laurent Clerc. (British Sign Language is unrelated to ASL.)

People later founded many state residential schools for the deaf and hired deaf graduates of the American School as teachers and staff. Then true, systematized dialects of ASL started developing. The founding of Gallaudet University in 1864 both furthered the education of the deaf and helped to create an unofficial standard ASL.

Depending on how many Inuit are actually using a sign language, perhaps more of these focus group gatherings will put Inuit Sign Language on a path to becoming a more standardized language than it probably is now.

Nicaraguan Sign Language

On a related note: Nicaraguan Sign Language is only twenty to thirty years old. It has grown out of the home signs and systems of isolated deaf Nicaraguans who finally came together for school. Newer, younger deaf students came along and instinctively made the varying signs more systematic and grammatical (creolization). I like this quote from the the Nicaraguan Sign Language article:

With all of these idiosyncrasies, it is easy to forget that Nicaraguan Sign Language is but the accidental creation of children. Indeed, adult-engineered idioms like Esperanto seem pallid by comparison. As [sign-language linguist Judy] Kegl marvels, “No linguist could create a language with half the complexity or richness that a 4-year-old could give birth to.”