No man's land

I know I’m terrible at updating this blog, apologies to Helen and Dougal who actually read the damn thing….

I’ve been travelling a lot for work, visiting various deaf schools around Scotland. In fact as I write this I am sitting on a train to Glasgow as I am testing over the next three days. One nice surprise to come out of working in the deaf schools is that my BSL skills are up to the job. I knew that, having gained my Level 2, I was technically a good enough signer however having not had the chance to use it for nigh on 8 months, there was always the fear that most of it had fallen out of my ears. And trying to explain that to my boss who hired me on the basis that I knew BSL (along with my many other wonderful qualities of course) would have been slightly tricky.

I feel the need to confess that whilst I say my BSL skills are good enough, what really happens in practice is that my Sign Supported English skills are good enough. Anyone who has heard me rant about SSE will know that I’m not a huge fan of it. My main gripe is not from people like myself using it – I made the conscience decision that it was better to use well-formed signs with correct English grammar than it was to use horrifically bad BSL grammar and confuse the hell out of school children – but rather that this is used by teachers/ schools under the pretence that they are using BSL. SSE has its uses but as a first language is not one of them.

I’m beginning to truly understand for the first time just how different BSL is from English. Not just in terms of grammar etc, but rather how ideas, concepts and explanations are expressed and how what language we use can change our entire understanding of the world. I was told by a friend studying Japanese that because of the structure, you have to know what you are saying when you start saying it, unlike English where you can change your intended utterance halfway through and still produce a grammatically correct, logical sentence. One of the products of this is that there is much less uncertainty in the language which, as testament to the power of linguistics, is reflected in the way people view the world and their behaviour in that world. I can’t give you a concrete example of this in BSL because I’m just starting to notice it myself. On the surface, as a hearing, basic level signer, BSL almost seems like a sub-par language when it comes to trying to give an explanation, especially about an abstract idea. Then suddenly I’ll see the interpreter sign something that in English would seem clunky and laborious but in BSL is almost beautiful its clarity and its power.

Which brings me back to the subject of SSE. If a child is being taught by someone who is using SSE rather than BSL then they’re not going to have access to the unique viewpoint that is transmitted linguistically by different languages. The signs don’t lend themselves to nuances of English regardless of how strictly the word order is followed, and the lack of true BSL means that they won’t pick up embedded meaning in that language either.

Deaf children are almost unique in being in this ‘no man's land’ of language. The problem with trying to research this, or even to think about it is, in my opinion, that we are unable to remove ourselves from the thought of having a first language. If you don’t have a basic schema of how to process the world then what do you map new information on to?