Early Research on Finnish Sign Language: In the Footsteps of Great Role Models

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• Early Research on Finnish Sign Language:In the Footsteps of Great Role Models
• Terhi Rissanen (bio), Päivi Rainò (bio), and Ritva Takkinen (bio)

Research on Finnish Sign Language (FinSL) started in 1982 at Helsinki University. The main drivers behind it were Professor Fred Karlsson, then head of the Department of General Linguistics at Helsinki University and Liisa Kauppinen, who was the executive director of the Finnish Association of the Deaf (and who, in later years, received honorary doctorates from Gallaudet University, the University of Jyväskylä in Finland, and Trinity College in Ireland). The first paid researchers in this new endeavor were a linguistics student, Terhi Rissanen, together with Thomas Sandholm, a native FinSL signer. Their combined experiences are recounted in the first section of this article. In the second section, Päivi Rainò, who grew [End Page 362]

Click for larger view
View full resolution Figure 1.

Early researchers Terhi Rissanen and Thomas Sandholm.

up in a signing family, recounts how she joined this team as a student intern. The third section is by Ritva Takkinen, who describes how she became interested in signing while studying to be a speech therapist in the early 1970s and went on to do research on the acquisition of FinSL while working on her MA thesis and later her PhD thesis.

Terhi Rissanen

When I started my sign language research career in 1982 at Helsinki University, I was a twenty-nine-year-old with a BA in linguistics and a mother of two little children: a deaf boy and a hearing girl.

I had studied English philology, Finno-Ugric languages, general linguistics, and pedagogy at the University of Turku, a unique combination of my own choosing that had no clear path to any established profession. In 1974, I married a man who had studied another unconventional combination—cultural anthropology, Arabic literature, and Orientalism at Helsinki University. In 1976, we had a deaf son. This came as something of a surprise, since we had no known deaf relatives in either family tree.

In 1977, I received a scholarship to study in the United Kingdom at the Summer Institute of Linguistics at the University of Reading, where I learned about the legacy of Eunice Pike and Eugene Nida. Among other things, we were taught how to work with a native informant of an exotic language and perform tasks like notetaking [End Page 363] of an unwritten language. When I started my work with Thomas Sandholm in 1982, this skill would come in handy.

Thomas and I started our FinSL research with The Snowman, the animated movie based on the children's book by Raymond Briggs. There had been a European project to collect signed versions of the film, and Thomas's deaf mother, Hely Sandholm, had signed the Finnish version. She was a renowned teacher of FinSL, a special lady who was very inspiring. Once she came to me and signed: you me / we-two colleagues / we-two deaf children mother you-me / we-two same identity. That was the most significant hug I've ever received from the Deaf community. Hely is deeply missed. During my career, I have wondered if there were other sign language researchers who were also parents of deaf children. Maybe there aren't too many of us.

Thomas and I sat side by side in front of a TV monitor and glossed the signs of The Snowman in Finnish words in a chart (table 1) and marked into each slot their locations, orientations, and movements with a numeric reference linked to a specific location in space. We aimed for high accuracy in the description of the ninety-two glossed pages of the story.

The work was laborious: We had no Photoshop in 1982, just VHS tapes, a video recorder, and a TV monitor with remote controls. Because the computer had no graphics interface, we had to program everything manually, but our technical skills were low. I had taken a course in computer science in which only the lecturer had a computer, while all the rest of us watched the overhead projector screen and wrote down what was said. So, when I got my first Macintosh, with its...