From Curiosity to Collaboration—Linguistic Explorations of Sign Language in Belgium

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• From Curiosity to Collaboration—Linguistic Explorations of Sign Language in Belgium
• Filip Loncke (bio)

In 1973, Bernard Tervoort of the University of Amsterdam published an article in the journal Semiotica with the title "Could There Be a Human Sign Language?" The question that Tervoort had asked in this article must be seen against a theoretical and almost philosophical discussion. Only a decade earlier, in 1960, Charles Hockett, an influential and widely respected linguist, had pointed to the use of the vocal-auditory channel as the most obviously defining design feature of what languages are. However, that same year, 1960, saw the publication of an initially hardly noticed booklet "Sign Language Structure" by Stokoe. And the 1960s was also the decade in which linguists adopted theories and views that suggested that the acquisition of a language might rely on an inborn biological tendency shared by all humans. Interest in sign language and sign language research emerged as a natural byproduct.

Of course, I didn't know any of that when I started my first job in 1973. I had graduated with a bachelor's degree in educational [End Page 344]

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Bernard Tervoort. Photo courtesy of lingoblog.dk.

psychology from the University of Ghent in Belgium. I was hired to work as a coordinator of teaching and other educational staff in a school for children and adolescents with special needs, including about one hundred deaf students between six and sixteen years old. On my first day, the director of the school was going to give me a tour and explain how things were organized. When I arrived at his office to start the tour, I found him in a (in my eyes, very fluent) signing conversation with one of the deaf students. Once we started our tour, he explained the pedagogy that was followed in the school, including a statement that sign language was not used because it interfered with the educational goals, the ability to speak being a primary one.

This all felt very confusing to me. I did not know anything about deafness or deaf education, let alone of the existence of a deaf [End Page 345] community. I started to ask and read left and right and was, at the same time, amazed to find almost entirely disconnected circuits of thinking with, on the one hand, a growing fascination of language in the visual modality and, on the other hand, a total lack of interest or curiosity on how these new findings should be urging a rethinking of old ideas and educational practices.

Was sign language a language or not, and if it was, what does this mean? I listened to what educators told me and what I could find in the literature, which was initially not too much.

I found Tervoort's 1953 doctoral dissertation in the school's library—it consisted of two volumes in Dutch, which would be reedited and translated into English in 1975 as Developmental Features of Visual Communication. A Psycholinguistic Analysis of Deaf Children's Growth in Communicative Competence. Interestingly, Tervoort shied away from describing the communication he had observed in schools for the deaf as sign language but used the more prudent term esoteric communication. It appears to me that the choice of that term at that moment might be indicative of his uncertainty of the linguistic status of this form of communication. However, the study ends with an appeal to take this observed communication seriously and to recognize its value and, implicitly, its usefulness in educational settings.

Out of the blue, in 1975, an uncle of mine (whom I had only met once when I was ten), a sinologist at the University of Washington, sent me a photocopy of Nancy Frishberg's 1974 article on historical changes in ASL, which had been published in Language. Clearly, if a prestigious journal such as Language publishes sign language research articles, one takes notice. Sign language research and linguistics are important: it was worth pursuing this a bit more.

In the meantime, while I was at my job, I started a master's program in psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics at the University of Brussels. I...