Author:

Keywords:

South African Sign Language, South African Deaf Community, Communication in the South African Deaf Community

Abstract:

It is estimated that approximately 600,000 South Africans use a signed language in their daily lives. The vast majority of these are both audiologically deaf and culturally Deaf, although there is a small number of hearing people, usually children of Deaf adults or professionals working closely with members of the Deaf community, who also use South African Sign Language (SASL) regularly and frequently. In post-apartheid South Africa there are 11 official languages, all of them spoken languages, but South African Sign Language is mentioned explicitly in the constitution of the Republic of South Africa, as adopted on May 8, 1996, as one of the other languages of South Africa (together with the Khoi, Nama and San languages) that “must be promoted and adequate conditions for its ongoing development and use must be created”. The idea is that Deaf people should have access to communication and information by means of SASL interpreters. Furthermore, the South African Schools Act of 1996 states that SASL is to be the medium of instruction in schools for the Deaf. Thus, although SASL is not an official language of the country, it does have the status of a medium of instruction in schools that are set up specifically to cater for the needs of Deaf pupils. In reality, however, the present situation in schools for the Deaf does not, by any means, conform to the stipulations of the South African Schools Act. Deaf education ranges from no education to certain (groups of) black deaf children, over Signed English education to other groups of (black, coloured and Indian) deaf children, to oral education to white deaf children. Deaf pupils are not educated through the medium of a signed language, either because there are so few teachers of the Deaf who are fluent in SASL, because the schools have policies that allow for simultaneous communication, or because the schools have policies of total oralism. Clearly there is a clash between the government’s official policy and that of most hearing professionals working in Deaf education. Even though the official position towards SASL is that “adequate conditions for its ongoing development and use must be created”, when different communicative domains are looked into it immediately becomes clear that this is not in line with reality. Within the field of professional services (social work, psychological services etc.) Deaf people have to use a spoken/written language without being able to use SASL. For meetings, conference, debates, political gatherings, etc. in the public domain, Deaf people can very rarely make use of SASL by means of interpreters. For most other services no interpreters are provided, or only sporadically. This means that no interpreter services are provided for e.g. banking, tourism, insurance, legal consultation, medical consultation (aids counselling, terminal illness counselling, bereavement counselling), religious services (except for 5 congregations specifically for Deaf people in South Africa), etc. In order to gain some insight into how Deaf people deal with these communication barriers and whether the actual practices in the everyday lives of Deaf people might at least to some extent be in line with official policies, a large scale project was set up in which Deaf people were interviewed by Deaf interviewers through SASL. The idea was that per province one Deaf interviewer would interview 6 Deaf people (from his/her own province) with different backgrounds (hearing parents / Deaf parents, further education / no further education, etc.) through SASL, that the interviews would be videotaped and the tapes would be sent to us for further analysis. For this purpose Deaf “leaders” from the 9 South African provinces were invited to a one-day workshop at the University of the Free State at Bloemfontein in which the goals and the methodology of our study were explained (through SASL). They were then given a list of topics that we were interested in and questions that they had to use as a guideline for the interviews. Next to some personal (anonymised) information all the questions concentrated on communication in different domains. We included questions on participation in the Deaf community, on education, on employment, on family life, on media accessibility, on interpreting and finally some questions on (the end of) apartheid and accessibility to information about AIDS-prevention. The afternoon of the one-day workshop was subsequently spent on simulations of these interviews in which one of the leaders acted as interviewer and one as interviewee. At the end of the day the interviewers went back home again, each with a videocamera. At the moment (eventhough not everything went as smoothly as we had hoped for) all the interviews have been sent back and are being translated into English. Since it will be impossible to include information from all the interviews (we have got more than 60 hours of data) we will limit ourselves to a couple of interviews with people from completely different regions and backgrounds and focus on communication (and the break-down of communication) in institutions. Eventhough this is not the focus of our paper it has become clear to us that this type of ethnographic research is extremely important to South-African Deaf people. Most interviewees were thrilled that they could tell us their life-stories, since for most of them this was the first time that their narratives would be heard outside the Deaf community. It is estimated that one in three deaf adults in South Africa is functionally illiterate and the average deaf school leaver has a written language comprehension ability equal to that of an average hearing child of eight, so that exchange of information (in whichever direction: Deaf to hearing or hearing to Deaf) by means of a written form of English or any of the other spoken languages in South Africa is very much restricted. At the same time a lot of the interviewees (especially the “grass-roots” Deaf people) were astonished by the fact that “academia” (which is so far away from their own world) could be interested in their lives. For some of them our ethnographic research actually resulted in a budding Deaf Awareness and even some sense of Deaf Pride. References Aarons, D. & P Akach 1998. South African Sign Language—One language or many? A sociolinguistic question. Stellenbosch Papes in Linguistics 31: 1-28 Aarons, Debra, Akach, Philemon. 2002b. 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In: Journal of Negro Education 56: 3, p. 299-312. Reynolds, Louise. 1995. News from South Africa: Philosophies and practices in deaf education in the Western Cape, SA. In: Signpost 8: 1-2, p. 66-71. Simmons, Robert M.T. 1994. The role of educational systems and deaf culture in the development of sign language in South Africa. In: Erting, Carol J. et al (eds), The deaf way: perspectives from the International Conference on Deaf Culture. Washington, DC : Gallaudet University Press, p. 78-84. UNESCO. 1999. Inclusive education and the Deaf Child in South Africa. UNESCO Consultation Report. April 1999.