Variation: A Product of Language Use
Language is a community product, never occurring as an isolated phenomenon. As people use a language they shape it. Their actual use of the language in a given situation in turn provides clues about them. To understand this, the make-up of a community must be considered. Within any community there are different sub-groups based on regional, educational and professional backgrounds, age and sex of members. For example, a group of recent college graduates from a large metropolitan New England city is quite different from a group of middle-aged suburban couples in the same city. The differences are reflected in the vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar of each group, so that we can usually identify - at least partially - a person's social background from the way he or she is speaking.
This is just one observable phenomenon of language variation. A second consideration is that language variation results from the constant changes which occur in the language of an existing community. Although the changes take place in all aspects of language, they are so gradual that the speakers may be unaware of them. Looking at a language from the vantage point of several hundred years provides the viewer with a clear grasp of this concept. Pick up a volume of Shakespeare in the original version and glance at a page or two. It's obvious that the English spoken in Shakespeare's time is quite different from the English spoken today.
Linguistic change often starts within a particular sub-group and then gradually spreads to adjoining groups in a wave-like movement. Thus, these changes occur according to different time schedules in different social and geographical groups, accounting partially for the language variation known as dialects.
The members of a group also have different styles of expression available to them ranging from formal to informal depending on the social situation and the subject of conversation. We do not speak the same way to a child, a mailman, a police officer, a waitress, a teacher, or a judge.
In some communities, the difference between formal and informal styles is so great that it is almost like having two languages. The informal variety is learned at home and it is used by the members of the community for their everyday communication. The formal variety is for church, lectures, official, or written communication, and conversation with outsiders. Probably learned in school, the formal variety carries more prestige. However, few people in the community become totally fluent in it. A community of this type exists in German Switzerland, where the village population uses standard German only for formal occasions, while they use their own variety to converse among themselves.
An identical situation exists in bilingual communities in which each language has a specific role. For example, Puerto Ricans living in the United States retain Spanish as the everyday language of their community, while English is their formal language. ASL and English play similar roles for members of the deaf community.
In such cultural groups, the everyday language becomes the vehicle through which members express to each other their particular experiences and ways of looking at life. It also serves to identify other members and to transmit the culture to new generations. Such cultural groups as blacks, Puerto Ricans, Indians, and Acadians among others, each have either their own language or their own variety of English.
ASL in the Deaf Community
ASL serves the same functions for those deaf people who were brought up in the deaf community. Deaf persons socialized in the deaf community are those who had deaf parents or who made early contact with other deaf individuals in residential (boarding) schools for deaf students. Having learned ASL spontaneously like hearing children learn to talk their parents' language, these deaf persons think and express themselves intellectually and emotionally best in ASL. In other words, ASL is their native tongue.
Just like the members of other minority groups who have their own language, deaf people in the United States also come into contact with English to the extent of their abilities. Deaf persons thus may choose between two languages - ASL and English - depending on the degree of formality which a situation presents. However, in the case of deaf persons, the variety of English used often takes a visible form involving signs. Called Sign English or Manual English, this kind of communication combines the vocabulary of ASL with the word order of English, although both are somewhat modified in the process.
Thus, in effect, Sign English is a mixed language. When two groups of interacting people cannot make themselves understood, a mixed language is often the result. In the case of Sign English, the combination of signs and English permits communication between deaf persons and those who are not members of the deaf community, as well as a mode of communication among deaf people for formal situations.
