With the exception of those two babies and me, nearly everyone here is deaf, and they are chattering away in a silent language—the language of signs. They have come from all over the country to attend a special congress of the British Deaf Association (BDA). And as I can see all around me, they are relishing the chance to take over a large space and, for once, to watch their own form of communication prevail.
Most people recognise nowadays that sign languages are linguistically much the same as any other language. They are autonomous linguistic systems, independent of spoken languages on the one hand and mimicry and pantomime on the other. Linguists have identified more than 100 separate sign languages, from Adamorobe and Algerian to Croatian and Venezuelan, all of them different from each other, and all displaying the same kinds of characteristics that define mainstream languages. Just like their spoken counterparts, sign languages are essentially collections of arbitrary symbols that little children can learn to reiterate and recombine without limit, even if the finest grammarians may have difficulty sorting out their syntax. And as I marvel at the quiet hurly-burly that surrounds me, with dozens of conversations flashing round the theatre but no one being interrupted or distracted by anyone else, I can see the practical and aesthetic advantages of signing compared with the loud, rude intrusiveness of speech.
The lingua franca here in Inverness is British Sign Language (BSL), and for the benefit of a handful of aliens like me there are plenty of interpreters around, working between BSL and spoken or written English, or for that matter between BSL and American or French Sign Language (ASL and FSL). This gathering is the BDA's first big opportunity to celebrate one of the greatest achievements in its 115-year history: in 2003, after a long campaign, the association persuaded the British government to accept BSL as "a language in its own right… with its own vocabulary, grammar and syntax." A statement issued by the department of work and pensions in March that year recognised BSL as the "preferred language for participation in everyday life" for some 70,000 people in Britain, and called for it to be protected in the same way as other minority languages in Europe.
It is not so long ago that signing was regularly ridiculed as "monkey language," and even among the deaf it has often been dismissed as uncouth, pagan and primitive—perhaps an evolutionary throwback to some archaic pre-human condition. In 1880, an international conference was held in Milan to discuss the future of deaf education and weigh up the merits of three rival methods: the manualist system, based on gestures and signs; the oralist, based on the written form of a mainstream language, followed by "lip-reading" and articulate speech; and the bilingual or mixed, involving both signing and speech. Italy was famous for its oralist schools, and some delegates reported face-to-face conversations in which they were unable to tell the difference between senior pupils at Italian deaf schools and ordinary hearing Italians. A correspondent covering the event for the Times went so far as to claim that the Italian deaf were linguistically superior to their hearing compatriots, as they had been cured of that irritating habit of waving their arms about when they spoke.
On 11th September 1880, the Milan congress voted 160 to 4 in favour of exclusively oralist methods in deaf education. Among signers, that date is still remembered as the blackest in their history: their own 9/11, when the twin towers of sign language culture—the mixed and manualist methods of deaf education—were destroyed, and a long, bitter battle was joined to defend the signing way of life.
There are deaf people still alive today who were educated in accordance with strict Milan policy. They seem to have spent the best part of their childhood staring into mirrors and trying to learn the mouth shapes that corresponded to the different letters of the alphabet. The exercise was humiliating and frustrating, and for most of them a complete waste of time: they would never be able to pass as hearing, even if they wanted to, and their schooldays were devastated for no good reason at all. The worst of it was that, in order to make them concentrate on learning articulate speech, teachers would punish any pupils found trying to communicate by means of gestures or signs. For nearly a century, sign languages were persecuted in the very institutions that might have been expected to nurture them. They were not eliminated, however, but simply driven underground; where they survived thanks to the clan-destine, rebellious and bloody-minded counter-cultures of schoolchildren.
Those who feel they are losing their old faith in freedom, reason and human progress need only consider the revival of sign languages in the past 50 years if they want to reboot their social optimism. Sign languages are now permitted in all deaf schools, and in most they are taught explicitly and used as a medium of instruction too. A scaffolding of formal teaching, backed by films and video recordings, is giving the languages of the deaf a stability and uniformity they have never enjoyed before, and at the same time they are being diversified and enriched through sign theatre and sign poetry. Sign languages are being studied as second languages by people with normal hearing, and they are a hot topic for research in linguistics. The public has become accustomed to sign interpreters in theatres and on television. Signing has definitely turned a corner, and the delegates at the BDA congress have a remarkable victory to celebrate.
At last the show begins. The BSL troupe Deafinitely Theatre puts on an energetic performance, though the spectacle of five actors signing away at top speed for an hour is a bit much for a lifelong phonocentric like me. I am charmed and entertained, but before long I lose the plot.
I cope better with the sober daytime sessions—and so I should, given the quantity and quality of English interpreting, in text and sound, that has been laid on for the BSL-challenged minority at Inverness. The star speaker is Harlan Lane, the American historian who opened up the story of the oppression of the deaf with his book When the Mind Hears, published in 1984. Lane himself is not deaf, and it would seem that he stumbled into deaf history while investigating the medical ideas that circulated in Paris at the time of the French revolution. The record of callous injustice towards the deaf made him so indignant that he has specialised in historical problems about signing and deafness ever since. The distinguished, dapper professor is welcomed to Inverness as an honorary deaf person, or rather—to use the word preferred by those who regard themselves not as suffering a shortage of hearing but as enjoying a special aptitude in sign language culture—as Deaf with a capital D.
Lane has a name-sign of his own (as opposed to having his English name finger-spelt) and says a few things in American Sign Language (translated into BSL by a sign-to-sign interpreter), before reverting to spoken English. He alludes to his sign language teacher with the intensity that others reserve for their psychotherapists, and establishes his Deaf credentials by telling us how, the night before, he shared the double joy of a Deaf friend who recently became a parent and had just discovered that the baby was profoundly deaf: a cause for great rejoicing, since a deaf child will not be tempted (as hearing children of Deaf parents are) to forsake the graceful sign language culture of home in favour of the vulgar gratifications of the chattering hearing world.
Lane brings us urgent tidings from the "Deaf world" in the US—that is to say, from the 1m Americans who (by his reckoning) have ASL as their first language, rather than the 20m or so who merely suffer from some degree of hearing loss. These American Deafs, as Lane explains, have recently become conscious of themselves as guardians not only of their own language, but also of distinctive customs, values and memories, and they want the rest of society to start showing respect for their culture. They have started asserting their right to be regarded as an "ethnicity," like Afro-Americans, rather than a subgroup of the disabled alongside wheelchair users or the visually impaired. But they face powerful enemies. Speech therapists and hearing-aid makers have a vested interest in relegating the Deaf to the status of a "disability group," and geneticists and ear surgeons are even worse: by providing counselling to couples said to be at risk of having deaf children, or offering cochlear implants as a cure for congenital deafness, they are in effect plotting the extermination of the Deaf. British Deafs, says Lane, should heed the warnings of their American co-ethnics before it is too late. They must start to expose the sinister agenda of the specious philanthropists who offer to help the deaf by restoring their hearing. "Why do Britons fail to see that a programme with the foreseeable effect of diminishing or eradicating the Deaf minority is indeed genocide?" he asks. His warning is received with delight by most of his spectators, and they express their approval in the usual Deaf way: raising both hands, palms forwards, and rippling their fingers.
But Doug Alker, John Prescott lookalike and long-suffering chair of the BDA, looks troubled. He sympathises with those conscientious Deaf couples who feel driven, in spite of pressure from their peers, to consider genetic counselling for themselves or cochlear implants for their children. He also realises that the association would lose most of its funding if its members decided to turn on their heels and discharge themselves from the ranks of the disabled.
The next presentation—by Jim Kyle, a humorous hearing professor from Bristol who is bilingual in English and BSL—is untouched by such doubts. Kyle gratifies his audience with a jovial broadside against the BDA's sibling organisation, the Royal National Institute for Deaf People. The RNID has by far the larger constituency, since it sets out to represent all the 9m Britons with abnormal hearing, of whom fewer than one in 100 is reckoned to be Deaf in the sense of being a confident and fluent user of signs. According to Kyle, the institute is systematically damaging the interests of authentic Deafs: its collusion in government schemes for improving the design of hearing aids and increasing the availability of cochlear implants siphons off money that ought to be going to genuine Deaf causes, and promotes the degrading stereotype of the deaf as victims of a physical affliction rather than exponents of a noble cultural heritage.
The Lane-Kyle position has been described as Deaf nationalism, and the label is flaunted with pride by Paddy Ladd, another Bristol academic and one of the association's leading radicals. The long-haired Ladd was deaf from birth, but went to mainstream schools and did not discover Deaf culture until his twenties. Since then, he has adopted the same name-sign as Jesus and devoted himself to memorialising the era of sign language liberty that came to an end after 1880. His contribution to today's events—vigorously signed, sometimes a little fast for his interpreters—dwells on the 19th-century deaf French scholar Ferdinand Berthier, who not only pioneered the study of deaf history but also made heroic attempts to mould the deaf people of France into an independent "nation" in the 1840s. The forward march of the deaf nation was eventually halted by a conspiracy of oral imperialists, but it was not defeated, and Ladd suggests that it is now under way again, confident of ultimate victory.
It is hard to resist appeals in the name of a group that has suffered terrible injustices, but the case for Deaf nationalism makes me feel uneasy. The tone of militant activism may be attractive, but it seems to be accompanied by the same self-pitying authoritarianism as any other form of nationalism, and the same proprietorial prickliness ("How dare you comment on our problems when you do not share our plight?"). Of course the collective sufferings of the deaf should never be forgotten, but that does not mean they should be used as a pretext for sullen resentment, an excuse for denouncing deaf people who are suspected of harbouring doubts, or a cover for imposing a uniform identity on all deaf signers. The deaf journalist Bob McCullough, who writes a column about deaf issues for the Belfast Telegraph, has lost several friends by drawing attention to the desultory educational attainments of the deaf in Britain and America. Deaf children leave school with an average reading age of eight, he tells me, and deaf adults are culturally undernourished: they "do not read books or discuss literature to the same extent as the hearing." Synthetic militancy about signing, according to McCullough, is a ridiculous distraction.
Nationalist movements are notorious for getting their history wrong, and in this respect too Deaf nationalism is true to type. Like other national ideologies, it likes to tell itself stories about an age of heroes and happiness, brought to an end by a catastrophic defeat, leading to an extended convalescence which is even now preparing the way for national revival. As far as the Deaf nation is concerned, its happy days were presided over by a saintly French priest called the Abbé de l'Épée. In 1760, the Abbé met a pair of illiterate deaf girls in Paris, and decided to educate them in the rudiments of Christianity. He began by teaching them written French, but once they had learned a few words for everyday objects they came to a standstill, as far away as ever from the promised land of spiritual enlightenment. So the Abbé thought again, and resolved to make himself the pupil of his pupils, picking up the home-made gestures with which they communicated with each other, and using these signs to explain the abstract French words that he needed in order to expound the Christian gospel. Soon he was offering the sisters two lessons a week, free of charge and in his own home, and within three years they had been joined by a dozen more pupils, boys as well as girls. He was a man of wealth and leisure, and by 1780 he was able to accommodate more than 70 children in his classes.
The death of the Abbé de l'Épée coincided with the beginning of the French revolution, and the amiable old priest was claimed posthumously as a champion of "the rights of Man and the Citizen." His gestural system, according to the revolutionaries, was "the language of angels." His story was improved with every repetition, and embellished with new tales describing him sacrificing his riches for the sake of the deaf and their beautiful language, and ending his days poor but happy, surrounded by grieving alumni. But it was not until after the oralist coup at Milan in 1880 that de l'Épée came into his own as a national hero. A memorial was erected in Paris in 1909, and he was canonised as "father of the deaf" and symbolic leader of the struggle for the survival of sign languages.
Unfortunately for the national narrative, the records show that the Abbé had no conception of signing as it is understood today, and no inkling that there might be several distinct codes such as those now identified as French, American or British Sign Language. Authentic signs, as far as he was concerned, formed a single perfect language, blessedly preserved from the vortex of human conventions that engulfed other languages when the tower of Babel fell. On the other hand, he recognised that these "natural signs" were not much use either for religious purposes or for ordinary life in 18th-century Paris, so he modified them and gave them forms that could be directly matched with French words and grammatical categories. It never crossed his mind that these "methodical signs" could ever become a self-sufficient language; as far as he was concerned they were little more than a shorthand method of finger-spelling and their only function was to introduce deaf pupils to written French and thus to Christianity. Once that had been achieved, the Abbé's next task was to teach them lip-reading, and, if possible, articulate speech too, to enable them to play their full part in French life. The Abbé, in short, was not an anti-oralist, or any kind of precocious Deaf nationalist either.
Nor was the oralism of the Milan congress quite the malign and unprovoked disaster that Deaf nationalists believe it to be. No one today would dream of defending the attempt to eradicate signing from the education of profoundly deaf children. But the delegates to Milan were mainly concerned with the far larger group of hearing-impaired children who could learn spoken languages quite easily, provided they were given individual tuition and appropriate hearing aids while they were still young. And if some of the Milan oralists harboured theological prejudices against signing, others were reacting against the growing band of sign language romantics who were equally prejudiced in the opposite direction, holding that signs were more natural and noble than speech, so that the deaf had nothing to gain, and much to lose, from exposure to spoken languages. Many of the oralists had absorbed the lessons of 19th-century historical linguistics, and they regarded the great languages of the world as vast collective works of art. These languages had been under construction for centuries or even millennia, with fresh cultural riches constantly accruing to them, and they were now vast public treasuries crammed with the knowledge, poetry and wisdom of the past. Admiration for the beauty and efficiency of gestural language, they said, should not be used as a justification for preventing deaf children from coming into possession of these magnificent cultural heirlooms.
The Milan oralists had a good point, and subsequent advances in the understanding of signing have only strengthened it. Sign languages depend, as other languages do, on conventional codes, but they are far more vulnerable to social contingencies. When deaf children who have never observed signing are brought up together they will invent signs of their own, and within a few years they will be equipped with a fully functional sign language that has no ties to any other. But it is practically impossible for hearing infants to miss being exposed to speech, so they never have the chance to conjure a new language out of nothing.
But if the birthrate of sign languages is high, their life expectancy has always been low. Patterns of inheritance of congenital deafness do not produce self-perpetuating communities of the kind necessary for sustaining a language over many generations, and no sign languages have ever had much in the way of an effective or usable past. We may get excited when we come across old literary references to sign languages, in Plato or Cervantes for example, but their signs and syntax will never be recovered, let alone the knowledge they embodied or the sentiments they expressed. The sign languages of the past are among history's black holes, and those of the present have not built up the kind of linguistic back catalogue which, through quotation, resuscitation or ironic allusion, plays an important part in the daily life of spoken languages. The trouble with sign languages is that they have never had the wind of tradition in their sails.
Not yet, at least. If there is one thing that has prevented sign languages from becoming the equals of spoken ones, it is the fact that there are no widely used writing systems associated with them. One or two 19th-century inventors created notations for manual signs, but their efforts were not taken up. The champions of signing preferred to argue that since signs are by their nature visible, they can be represented graphically by naturalistic drawings or photographs, without recourse to the artificiality of the written characters that are used for representing speech. But the argument was perverse. The function of a writing system is not to depict the dappled complexity of individual utterances, but quite the opposite: to abstract from their incalculable sensory splendour and focus instead on their distinctive features as signs. Sign notation was reinvented in the 1960s and has been revised and improved since then, but its use is still confined to linguistic theorists engaged in lexical and grammatical analysis. As far as I know there are no signers, even among the most passionate Deaf nationalists, who use sign notation as a supplement or extension to their signing, in the way that speakers habitually use the writing systems linked with their languages. Sign language discourses still have to be translated into the words of a spoken language before they can be written down, rather as the barbarisms of the ancient Gauls or Britons had to be translated into Latin.
It is hard to believe that any mainstream spoken languages could have achieved greatness if they had not twined themselves round a writing system of some kind. The linguistic nationalists of 19th-century Europe made it their business to get their culture into print, with dictionaries and folk anthologies in Welsh, Scots, Danish, Breton and dozens of other languages. Anyone who cares for the future of sign languages must hope that the Deaf will follow suit.
I have slipped away from the conference for a while to take a walk on the banks of the Ness. Recalling my own labours long ago in the archives of deaf education, I reflect that Deaf nationalism has a much longer and broader history than you might suppose. It seems to have begun with a remark of Roche-Ambroise Sicard, the ambitious abbé who founded the National Institution for the Deaf in Paris in 1791 to carry on the work of the fabled Abbé de l'Épée. Sicard encouraged a systematic form of gestural signing among his pupils, and in 1800 he speculated about founding "a nation of deaf-mutes" where the language of signs could flourish as naturally as speech does among the hearing. Sicard's ideas had some influence in America, and in 1856, an American landowner called John J Flournoy suggested the institution of a separate commonwealth where the deaf as a people could enjoy "political independence" and "state sovereignty" at last.
That was all a long time ago, and as I wander round a park beside Loch Ness, I contemplate some of the monsters bred by dreams of national independence over the last 150 years. It strikes me as strange, given the murderous havoc wrought by nationalist movements in the past, that leaders of the Deaf community should be seeking to emulate them. But it also strikes me as unlikely that they will get very far. For one thing, sign language nationalism would tend to fragment the Deaf world rather than unify it: there are many different sign languages, and if BSL signers became consistent nationalists they would need to turn against the users of FSL or ASL, just as Basque nationalists try to buck the hegemonic languages of the Spanish and the French. Deaf nationalism would set the signers of the world at odds with each other instead of strengthening their solidarity.
In any case, it may not make sense for the Deaf to hope for any kind of nationhood at all. The main point of a nation is, after all, that its traditions are supposed to be passed down naturally from generation to generation, each new cohort of children absorbing them implicitly within their family circle from the moment they are born. But deafness is different. Most deaf children are born to hearing parents, and they will learn their sign languages not by hanging around at home but by going off to deaf school. And many of the children of Deaf parents have normal hearing, so while they will automatically learn signing at home, they are bound to become normal participants in spoken language too. Deaf nationalism is thus challenged not just by the prejudices of the hearing, but also by brute biological facts. Deaf communities can never aspire to the kind of cultural homogeneity within sealed boundaries that inspires traditional nationalists. They will always need to be more porous, more relaxed and more welcoming to strangers than national communities typically are. It strikes me, as dusk gathers and I find my way back to the signers in the Eden Court Theatre, that traditional politics may have more to learn from the deaf than the deaf have to learn from traditional politics.
