A Tale of Sign Language Dictionary Making in the Netherlands

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• A Tale of Sign Language Dictionary Making in the Netherlands
• Trude Schermer (bio)

How It Started

It was a beautiful fall afternoon in 1977 when I walked into one of the classrooms of the University of Amsterdam located in the Oudemanhuispoort. I was twenty-two, a student of Dutch language and literature about to start a second major, general linguistics.

One of my first introductions to this new field was a lecture by Professor Bernard Tervoort. As one of the founders of the new department, he was well known for his research on the communication of deaf children in the Netherlands (Tervoort 1953). He could also captivate his audience with numerous stories about his research from both the Netherlands and the United States.

His lecture was about the strictly oral education of deaf children in the Netherlands.

The main priority within deaf education in the Netherlands for almost a century was for deaf pupils to become—as much as possible—hearing people. The main focus in deaf education was therefore on learning how to speak and lipread. There was no mention at all, of course, of sign language being used. This has had consequences for the status of sign language, in the eyes of both deaf and hearing people: a sign language did not exist in a linguistic sense in the Netherlands, despite the fact that deaf people around the schools for the deaf have been using sign language at least since 1790, when the [End Page 464] first school for the deaf was established in Groningen by Henri Daniël Guyot (Betten 1990).

Tervoort's lecture would shape my plans for the future. I was taken aback by the fact that deaf pupils were not allowed to use their language in schools, that their teachers were all hearing who did not understand signing, and that their spoken language development was very much delayed compared to their hearing peers. I was puzzled. Catherine Snow, an American professor of language development at the Department of General Linguistics had told us about the importance of early mother-child interaction for the development of language. Would this not apply to deaf children as well?

In the same period, a new director was appointed at the Dutch Foundation for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing Child (NSDSK),¹ Truus van der Lem.² She was also puzzled by the fact that parents were not allowed to use signing with their children, given the poor results of deaf education at that time (Conrad 1979) and decided to start working together with the University of Amsterdam. The collaboration opened up research possibilities for master's students, which made it possible for me to study communication between hearing mothers and their deaf babies using video.

During this process, I had more and more questions and fewer and fewer answers. Especially influential were publications by Stokoe at that time on American Sign Language (ASL) as well as a 1979 conference in Copenhagen attended by parents from the NSDSK (see Engberg-Pedersen, this issue). In Copenhagen, the hearing parents were astonished by lectures given by deaf adults in various sign languages, which motivated them to question the approach to deaf education in the Netherlands.

Crucial to the developments in the 1980s and 90s was the close cooperation of the Dutch Foundation for the Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Child with the Dutch Deaf Council (established in 1977) and the University of Amsterdam. They had initiated a new approach to parent counseling, including new communication courses as part of the program for hearing parents of deaf children.

Meanwhile, I had finished my studies at the University of Amsterdam. Intrigued by the research being done on ASL, Ben Tervoort introduced me to Ursula Bellugi and Harlan Lane, and I [End Page 465] was determined to learn more about sign language research, and to do it in the United States.

I was admitted to the PhD program in experimental psychology at Northeastern University in September 1979, which was the start of a wonderful introduction to ASL research. It was a privilege to learn from passionate researchers and teachers, such as François Grosjean, Kerry Green, Joanne Miller, Marie Philip, Helen Mahut, Harlan...