This is a post-peer-review, author’s version of an article published in Language Policy (2012) 11:253–272,
ORIGINAL PAPER
Language justice for Sign Language Peoples: the UN
Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities
Sarah C. E. Batterbury
Abstract Sign Language Peoples (SLPs) across the world have developed their own languages and visuo-gestural-tactile cultures embodying their collective sense of Deafhood (Ladd 2003). Despite this, most nation-states tret their respective SLPs as disabled individuals, favoring disability benefits, cochlear implants, and mainstream education over language policies fostering native sign languages. This paper argues that sign language policy is necessary for language justice. Based on interviews with SLaPs and policy makers in the UK, this paper argues that ideally sign language policy requires a shift in policy discourse away from a disability construction to one recognizing the minority language status of SLPs. However minority language policy support for the formulation of sign language policies hitherto has been very limited. Conversely, the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) (UN 2007) offers the best hope for sign language policy notwithstanding its disability framing. The CRPD requires states to recognize sign languages and to support sign bilingual education, where appropriate. It employs a human rights approach, and is a potential stepping stone towards the emergence of minority language policies for SLPs. This paper argues that the CRPD offers a regulatory context that could enable a shift in policy discourse towards the eventual promulgation of the minority sign language policy that many Deaf-SLPs have called for. This strategy, as suggested here, offers the best chance of moving from a situation of social injustice for SLPs to one of language justice where full sign language access is promoted.
Keywords Sign Language Peoples (SLPs), Language justice, Legal recognition, Disability discourse, Sign language policy, UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD)
S. C. E. Batterbury , Centre for Deaf Studies, University of Bristol, 8 Woodland Road, Clifton, Bristol BS8 1TN, UK, e-mail:
Introduction
This paper argues that the UN Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) (UN 2007) has the potential to be an effective tool to achieve language policy which promotes greater social justice for Sign Language Peoples (SLPs). In making this argument, it is first necessary to explain the contested status of SLPs as a minority linguistic community. The term SLPs includes Deaf sign language users and their hearing kin (Batterbury et al. 2007).1 It is expressed in the plural in recognition of the diverse nature of the different national characteristics of SLPs. Although there is also hybridity within each national community, SLPs share commonality in Deafhood and the visual nature of their languages (Ladd 2003). Similarities have been asserted with indigenous first nation peoples, in particular in terms of the development of a concept of SLPs’ self-determination (Batterbury et al. 2007; Wrigley 1996). SLPs include Deaf individuals and also some hearing people who are part of signing communities.
Rooted in human rights legislation, the UN CRPD contains five articles referring to national sign languages, requiring their recognition and other linguistic human rights for SLPs. As of 2012, 110 states have ratified the CRPD. In the UK, the CRPD is currently the most progressive legal instrument supporting the emergence of sign language policy. It offers the prospect of sign bilingual education and formal recognition of British (BSL) and Irish Sign Languages (ISL). The CRPD provides a framework that UK SLPs can use to negotiate policy changes in their favor at both local and national levels (EHRC 2010:7). This paper argues that this has the potential to result in sign language policy and greater language justice for SLPs. Language justice is used to frame our understanding of social justice for SLPs, where language access is the overriding key to achieving greater equality. The paper analyzes the agenda for change expressed by UK SLPs and the extent to which the CRPD offers a way of achieving this given its current state of implementation in the UK. This is based on analysis of interviews with relevant policy makers and with SLPs from across the UK (Batterbury 2010).2
More specifically, this paper argues that despite its disability locus, the CRPD opens a pathway to eventual sign language policy in the minority language policy arena. It analyzes the way in which the CRPD offers a regulatory context that has the potential to deliver a seismic shift in policy discourse for Deaf-SLPs. Although there is a tension in a ‘disability treaty’ acting as a mechanism for language justice for SLPs, it is a significant step forward from anything that has hitherto been available. Achieving policy change that accords with the requirements of the CRPD necessitates some positive pressure from organizations led by SLPs to persuade governments to adopt a culturally Deaf perspective on language justice and
to interpret the CRPD favorably.3 This process is just beginning in the UK at the time of writing.
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1 The convention of capitalizing ‘‘Deaf’’ to refer to culturally Deaf people and lower case ‘‘deaf’’ to refer to audiological status is used throughout (Woodward 1972).
2 The paper also utilizes documents authored by SLPs: the British Deaf Association’s (BDA) response to the UK government’s (non) implementation of the sign language provisions of the CRPD, and other literature authored by SLPs (Ladd 2003; Emery 2011, BDA 2011b; SFF 2010).
Language justice versus linguistic human rights
The term linguistic human rights (LHRs) has been contested within sociolinguistics: Blommaert, for example, writes ‘‘[i]nequality has to do with modes of language use, not with languages’’ (2005:411, italics in original), stating that failure to comprehend the distinction can produce language policies that do not achieve their goals. However, the oral nature of spoken languages renders them inaccessible to most Deaf-SLPs; this factor overrides the impact of mode of language use. Sign languages are uniquely bound to SLPs: visual language cannot be substituted with sound-based languages for SLPs, previous attempts have failed abysmally (Lane 1999). Achieving sign language access is consequently of much greater significance than the existence of variance, regional dialects, borrowings and different registers within sign languages themselves (Ann 2001). Without legal LHRs and without any meaningful minority language accommodations, SLPs have consistently suffered social exclusion due to restricted access to information and education (Branson and Miller 2002). This has been especially acute since sign languages were banned in education in 1880; a situation that persisted for over a century.
Social exclusion has long been linked to minority language groups. May (2003a) favors minority language rights (MLRs), observing that justice requires that marginalized groups are included in modern nation states. He contests the inevitability of language shift, accusations of essentialism, and notions that the interests of minority language speakers are better met by the majority language, describing this as ‘‘majoritarian forms of linguistic essentialism’’ (2003b:95). Patten and Kymlicka also see minority languages as ‘‘a worthwhile cause’’ in the context of ‘‘oppression and injustice’’ (2003:49). In the case of SLPs, the option of shifting to the majority language is absent. Social exclusion is grounded in lack of access to information in the public sector, and in criminal justice, education, and health care. Exclusion is linked to Deaf-SLP status and lack of language access rather than being provoked by issues of hybridity among SLPs or any essentialist approaches to modes of sign language use (Ladd 2003).
This paper uses the term ‘language justice’, rather than either MLRs or LHRs to emphasize SLPs’ need to achieve social justice through language access rather than other forms social redistribution. May’s (2003b) approach to MLRs recognizes the importance of language and identity and its link to social exclusion, Skutnabb-Kangas describes LHRs as ‘‘necessary to satisfy people’s basic needs’’ (2010:213), but both approaches do not go further than advocating legal protection of fundamental minority language rights. Conversely, scholars of social justice place the onus on governments to redress inequalities through redistribution of benefits and burdens (Rawls 1999). Where inequality is linked to minority language status there is therefore a need for language justice that entails language policies that proactively redistribute resources. For SLPs, this involves capability approaches that locate entitlements within groups of peoples rather than individuals (Nussbaum 2003). This requires greater levels of social inclusion through language access, sign bilingual education, and promotion of their linguistic patrimony thereby enabling a process of SLPs’ community regeneration. The CRPD is currently the only legal instrument requiring states to deliver some aspects of language justice for SLPs.
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3 The use of the term ‘Deaf culture’ was first used by Padden (1980) to reflect that Deaf people have a shared language and established patterns of cultural transmission (Padden and Humphries 1988:9).
Sign Language Peoples and their sign languages
Analysis of Deaf communities has highlighted their collective linguistic and cultural patrimony (Bahan 1989; Lane et al. 1996, Padden and Humphries 1988). Deaf culture is defined by Ladd as a way of giving ‘‘utterance to the belief that Deaf communities contained their own ways of life mediated through their sign languages’’ (2003:xvii): the basis for shared experience of Deafhood. This is common to all Deaf-SLPs who, when together at Deaf events, instigate a temporally and spatially defined Deafhood, which can be recreated at will in the formation of local, national and international Deaf spaces (Breivik et al. 2002; Haualand 2007). For example, as the only hearing person at an international Deaf conference that took place in Palermo in Italy in 1983, Wrigley observed the emergence of a spontaneous sense of universal ‘‘citizenry’’ that did not require a physical place (1996:103).
Of course Deaf-SLPs also hold different beliefs and express their sign languages and cultures in many varied ways that they share and transmit to hearing-SLPs (Mudgett-Decaro 1998). There is, however, a commonality in visuo-gestural-tactile interaction and in formalizing this as sign language expression which reaches out beyond the confines of individual sign languages: Deaf-SLPs demonstrate relative ease in understanding other sign languages which they express as feeling ‘‘naturally bound to each other’’ (Batterbury et al. 2007:2907).
The UK has two named sign languages: British Sign Language (BSL) and Irish Sign Language (ISL) as well as different dialects. Between the 1960s and 1990s, evidence within Sign Linguistics demonstrated that sign languages were natural languages, previously conceived of as merely gesture systems by hearing people (Stokoe 1960; Brennan et al. 1984). Nevertheless, the misconception that sign languages are mere communication tools continues among the public, partly because there a paucity of political power and little penetration by Deaf people into the professions.
The history of Deaf people makes difficult reading. In previous centuries Deaf people were regarded as imbeciles, institutionalized, physically abused, and even experimented on (Branson and Miller 2002). The banning of sign languages in schools in 1880 saw the practice of oralism, in which spoken language was used as the medium of instruction. Education gave way to speech therapy; instruction was largely inaccessible and unintelligible to Deaf students. Schools also punished Deaf children for using sign languages and excluded Deaf teachers from schools (Branson and Miller 2002; Lane 1999). This resulted in generations of semi-literate and underachieving SLPs and is a factor in the higher than average rate of mental illness found among Deaf people (Conrad 1979; Powers 2003; Hindley and Kitson 2000).
Although oralism had a negative impact on learning and literacy, Deaf schools were also the locus for the development of shared Deaf identity and sign language. As 90 % of Deaf children are born to hearing parents, Deaf schools played a pivotal role in reproducing community cohesion, sign language and shared identity. Educational placement of Deaf children has oscillated in the UK, from Deaf school provision to mainstream provision, ultimately favoring open and often unsupported mainstreaming (as a result of the 1981 Education Act) (DES 1978). Four of the remaining 28 Deaf schools in the UK have been threatened with closure in the past five years due to dwindling class sizes: one of these is now closed; others have had to enter partnerships with mainstream schools (BDA 2011a; Heffernan 2011).
Baynton has suggested that oralism seeded ‘‘the trap of paternalism,’’ extending beyond school life. He describes a process where Deaf people became dependent on missioners and oralists to resolve communication difficulties and ‘support’ them as adults (1996:150). In the late 20th and 21st centuries, this disabling practice has transmuted into dependency culture through policies offering disability benefits for adult Deaf people; creating a benefit trap and stifling Deaf enterprise, collective consciousness, and community actualization. The dependency culture has its roots in linguistic exclusion and is fostered by the disability paradigm. As one UK Deaf entrepreneur interviewed noted, ‘‘local initiatives cannot get Deaf people, I can set up jobs and training but I can’t get Deaf people as they will lose their benefits. This needs to be changed.’’4
Disability or language minority?
The CRPD espouses a social model of disability (article 1), but despite its disability orientation it nevertheless requires state parties to recognize sign languages, thus it is argued, enabling sign language policy and ultimately language justice for SLPs. Many SLPs see themselves as a linguistic community rather than a disability formation and aspire to attainment of minority language rights (Jokinen 2005; Ladd 2003; Lane 2008; Edwards 2010). Ideally, sign language policies would be created within a policy arena of minority language legislation as this removes the emphasis from disability labeling and would offer parity with the treatment of other autochthonous minority languages. However, disability legislation has greater potency; it is enacted in the UK statutes through the Equality Act (2010) and requires service providers to take reasonable steps to avoid placing Deaf people at a disadvantage by providing auxiliary aids and services when required. The CRPD is likely to have greater reach than existing minority language instruments due to its perceived association with disability legislation in the UK such as the Equality Act. However, the CRPD, while serving as disability legislation, adopts a human rights approach to recognition of sign languages. As such, a disability rather than a minority language treaty is opening up the possibility of radical policy change.