Exploring Danish Sign Language in the Late 1970s

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• Exploring Danish Sign Language in the Late 1970s
• Elisabeth Engberg-Pedersen (bio)

The Present

It's August 2022, and I am working on an analysis of the position of temporal adverbs and stance adverbs in declarative clauses in Danish Sign Language (DTS). My data are sentences from the DTS online dictionary (Ordbog over Dansk Tegnsprog), from which I have extracted all examples with adverbs like i-går "yesterday," ofte "often," heldigvis "fortunately," and bestemt "definitely." I check the examples for markers of clause boundaries, watching them at normal speed and in slow motion on my laptop. The examples are extractions from video-recorded diaries and discussions, rerecorded and provided with a rough annotation that makes it possible to search the dictionary for glosses of specific signs. I already have some idea about the structure of clauses in DTS (Engberg-Pedersen 2002) and can categorize the adverbs after their position relative to topicalized constituents, topics, and predicates.

The Late 1970s

All that is in stark contrast to the situation in the late 1970s. Many years earlier, I had seen the 1952 British film Mandy about a deaf girl who learns to say a few words by means of a balloon that makes her feel the vibrations of sound. Today, we would see this outcome of deaf education as very poor. But the film left a lasting imprint on me.

In 1976, I met the Swedish linguist Inger Ahlgren, who told me about her work with deaf children and their deaf and hearing parents. In contrast to Mandy's situation in the 1950s, Inger described a [End Page 357]

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Elisabeth Engberg-Pedersen (left) with some of her Scandinavian colleagues: Brita Bergman and Lars Wallin (Sweden), Marit Vogt-Svendsen (Norway).

situation where the hearing parents and their deaf children acquired Swedish Sign Language by interacting with the deaf parents and their children.

I was fascinated by the thought of a visual language, and in 1977, I wrote to Britta Hansen, who was head of the Center for Total Communication in Copenhagen. The center had been established in 1973 thanks to a bequest. Its aim was to improve communication between deaf and hearing people. At that time, it was not obvious to everyone that DTS was a language in its own right and the best language model for deaf children. But little by little, the authorities, the teachers of the deaf, parents of deaf children, and deaf people themselves realized the potential of DTS for giving deaf children the opportunity to develop cognitively, socially, and emotionally.

Britta invited me to visit the center. The year before, she and a teacher for the deaf, Ruth K. Sørensen, had asked forty-four deaf children, aged six to fifteen, to describe pictures to each other in [End Page 358] pairs—a sender and a receiver. The children got four identical pictures in different orders, and the senders described the pictures in the order they saw them; the receivers had to pick the right picture out of the four after each description. One result from the study was that children with deaf parents or siblings used more fixed sign orders than the other children, and their receivers were more successful in picking the right picture (Sørensen and Hansen 1976).

In 1977, Britta and Ruth were planning to do a follow-up with deaf adults. They invited me to join a group preparing the project. The group consisted of themselves, Asger Bergman, the first deaf teacher for the deaf in modern times, and—me. Asger has a deaf family background, and although he did speak some Danish at the meetings for my benefit, I had a hard time following his argumentation because he usually switched to DTS when he got to the point of his contributions. But we managed to submit an application to the Danish Research Council for the Humanities in the autumn of 1978 and got a grant to study adult DTS for sixteen months starting in February 1979.

At the time, I was still an MA student of linguistics at the University of Copenhagen and in the middle of writing my thesis (on a...