A sign language hub to preserve Deaf culture
Being deaf is more than a health condition. It can involve an entire culture. Deaf signers have specific art and literature, a unique perspective on historical events, their own behavioural expressions, and yes, even their own way to crack a joke. What they don’t really have, however, is a single place concentrating all aspects of Deaf culture. As Josep Quer, who specialises in research around natural language at ICREA-Pompeu Fabra University, explains: “Deaf signers are typically approached through the prism of disability. The general public knows deafness with a small ‘d’ as a medical condition, but Deaf culture with a capital D is completely invisible to most of us.” This is not a minor detail. By seeing sign language as a remedy rather than a culture in its own right, society creates a breeding ground for language impairment and the psychological conditions derived from it. And this is precisely what Quer wanted to avoid with the project SIGN-HUB (The Sign Hub: preserving, researching and fostering the linguistic, historical and cultural heritage of European Deaf signing communities with an integral resource).
Beyond research: a bible for the community
“We want this whole part of the European collective memory to be in the spotlight,” he adds. “To get there, we have created a knowledge hub on sign language and Deaf communities with different types of content that can be extended as further resources are developed.” The platform compiles the digital grammars of seven different sign languages from the participating countries: France, Germany, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and Turkey. While this may sound standard for spoken language, this is actually a first for the Deaf community – and a groundbreaking one at that. “No reference grammars for sign languages existed before our project. Knowledge was often scattered across a very diverse range of publications. These were not easily accessible, so compiling them in a coherent manner while adding new research was no trivial task. Moreover, not all sign languages benefit from the same level of research. This created imbalance across the grammars we produced,” Quer explains. The grammars are useful to linguists of course, but not only them. They can help teachers wishing to produce material for Deaf children or facilitate interpreter training. They can also be used to develop tools assessing language development and impairment, which are currently very scarce. Besides the grammars, the SIGN-HUB platform also includes an interactive Atlas of sign language structures that gathers data from across the world, along with interviews discussing older Deaf life forms with seniors. The Atlas notably showcases visually how diverse sign languages are at all grammatical levels (phonology, morphology and syntax). It provides basic information about their socio-historical background. The interviews, on the other hand, were used in a documentary movie called ‘We were there, we are here’. “Nothing like this existed before,” Quer says. “The Atlas should facilitate comparative work between sign languages while enabling researchers to confront it with the typological variations we encounter in spoken languages. It should also help us better understand the abstract properties of human language.” The public launch of the SIGN-HUB platform has been delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time of writing, Quer expected the documentary movie to be first shown on 24 June during the FEAST conference – a Sign Linguistics conference associated with the project. “Our hope is that our work will encourage people to carry out further research, and that it will also reach an audience outside the niche of Sign Linguistics and Deaf Studies. This is everyone’s language and cultural heritage. From a broader perspective, we hope this will make sign languages and signing communities more visible to everyone while challenging misconceptions,” Quer concludes.
Keywords
SIGN-HUB, Deaf, cultural heritage, online platform, sign language
