Happy anniversary to the genesis of modern signed language studies. It’s been 56 years since William C. Stokoe’s Sign Language Structure: An Outline of the Visual Communication Systems of the American Deaf was completed on April 1, 1960. A few years ago, I finally held an original printing in my hands. Why had it taken me so long?
After all, I’m named on the first page—and so are you! Three times.
In that seminal announcement, Stokoe not only only introduced the features of what would come to be called American Sign Language, but recognized that the linguistic community included “deaf and hearing user(s)”.
These “hearing companions” shared culturally-received behaviors and linguistic patterns which had developed apart from “the normal communication” of the hearing world.
The page ends with a reference that certain gestures carried meaning between “the deaf mute and perhaps also that of his hearing partners in communication.”
Though Stokoe typically confined his subjects to signing Deaf people in the United States, he is careful to include hearing bilinguals in his analyses, lamenting that such were “in scarce supply.” Some of these people develop into “the most valuable interpreters not just of language but of those aspects of hearing culture not directly accessible to the deaf” (Stokoe, 1972, p. 157).
Twenty years after that blue monograph changed the world, Cokely (1980) applauded the fact “that Stokoe’s work has been responsible for fostering much of the research on the linguistic structure of American Sign Language,” adding that “the training of interpreters” might be one of the more significant long-term effects of that legacy (p. 155).
But these sources deal with a fully-realized language within a mature Deaf community. My research into early interpreting includes the question, “How did bilingual–bimodals emerge before Deaf communities and standardized signed languages were formed?”
We can draw one example from Stokoe’s more recent criticism of the analysis of an isolated deaf resident in an area of the Solomon Islands. He noted that Kuschel (1973) called “Kangobai the Silent Inventor, but of course his sign language was not the invention of one individual. It grew out of give and take, the everyday interaction in that island culture, between deaf Kangobai and his hearing companions.” Within Kangobai’s lifetime, many hearing friends and family collaborated with him, and had already formed linguistic rules around their signs (Stokoe, 2001, p. 70).
I believe this collaborative pattern has always existed, and hearing interpreters can re-imagine their distant past, developing alongside, not directly from Deaf communities.
References
Cokely, D. (1980). Sign language: Teaching, interpreting, and educational policy. In C. Baker & R. Battison (Eds.), Sign language and the deaf community: Essays in honor of William C. Stokoe (pp. 137–158).
Kuschel, R. (1973). The silent inventor. Sign Language Studies, 3, 1–27.
Stokoe, W. C. (1960). Sign Language structure: An outline of the visual communication systems of the American deaf.
Stokoe, W. (1972). Semiotics and human sign languages.
Stokoe, W. C. (2001). Language in hand: Why sign came before speech.