Deaf people’s English isn’t “broken”
A sneak peek at the upcoming poster presentation with Dr. Lina Hou of University of California Santa Barbara. We present this work at SIGN10 next week.
We argue that there is an ASL variation of English. This looks like…
- Manipulating text to represent ASL signs e.g. 5–8-in-Mind.
2. Coining new words such as kissfist to represent signs that don’t have 1:1 counterparts in English.
3. Language play where we intentionally inflect English with ASL such as word order differences, the elimination of certain linguistic aspects such as suffixes, using gloss, or ASL concepts such as JumpHard as a substitute for excited/thrilled.
4. Common idiosyncrasies in English text produced by deaf people that are influenced by our daily use of ASL such as differences in our usage of articles (a, an, the) and tenses. Many of those idiosyncrasies emerge as early as the 19th century in written texts produced by deaf people in the U.S.
The usage of text messaging and social media platforms have made such language play and idiosyncrasies more apparent (and perhaps more standardized and widespread).
These writings often don’t make sense to non-signing people but we make sense to each other. In this way, our writing is transgressive.
Transgressive Because:
we’re writing for each other, not the majority.
we’re using English text with confidence despite systemic audism that tells us that written language is “not our forte.”
we’re not worrying about proper language or following the rules.
we’re intentionally flouting the “rules” even when we know when we’re breaking them.
we’re showing that those rules aren’t necessary to understanding each other.
This is a demonstration of one core principle of crip linguistics: listen flexibly.
