Myth: Sign Language is Universal

The creation of a universal language uniting all mankind is an idea that has interested scholars for several centuries. It is an exciting idea! Imagine a language which can break down the barriers that tend to separate the different peoples of the world. The idea has not been left to gather dust. Various attempts have been made to invent such a language. The most widely known invented language, Esperanto, has about one million speakers, but very few speakers use it as their everyday language. Considering that the world population is already over four billion, this is not a truly popular universal language. In fact, no invented language has ever been widely accepted.

The suggestion has been made that a true universal language exists already. Margaret Mead, among others, recently proposed that sign language is the universal language par excellence. According to this claim, sign language is not only universal, but easy to learn. It could, therefore, be used by anyone for world-wide communication.

This proposal was made also by early writers on sign language, such as the Abbé de l'Epée, the French priest who founded public education for the deaf late in the 18th century, and Remy Valade, who wrote the first grammar book on French Sign Language in 1854. These authors believed that sign language imitates objects and events and presents them as they occur in nature, just as an artist paints the scene in front of him.

According to de l'Epée and Valade, there is one Sign Language*, which is a natural language uniting deaf people everywhere in the world. They suggested that if hearing people learned to communicate in sign language, the world would have an excellent, ready-made universal language.

However, even a brief look at the known sign languages of the world invalidates this contention. American Sign Language, British Sign Language, Japanese Sign Language, Danish Sign Language, and other sign languages differ from each other as much as spoken languages differ. Just like different spoken languages, different sign languages are mutually unintelligible. For instance, a deaf person from Britain, who knows only his own sign language, cannot understand two deaf Americans signing to each other in ASL.**

Today, linguists who study ASL believe that it is "natural" in the same sense that English, French, and Russian are natural languages. Every natural language plays an important role in the day-to-day life of the people who use it, providing a group of people with a means for communicating with each other as well as a means for passing on knowledge from generation to generation.*** Constantly changing, natural languages adapt to meet the new conditions and particular needs of subgroups of the community. It is through change and adaptation that natural languages show their life.

On the other hand, a language such as Esperanto, invented to be a universal system, lacks the community roots so identifiable in natural languages. With the form of the language determined at the time of its invention, such a language remains changeless. Like a plastic flower, it has only the appearance of life.

With the exception of the following digression, the remainder of this discussion concerns American Sign Language, its structural regularity and vitality. Pertinent facts about language in general will be introduced as necessary to clarify the myths and misunderstandings which surround American Sign Language.

A Necessary Digression

Specific note must be taken of invented sign systems in the field of deafness because of a recent proliferation of such systems. There has been interest in such systems for use with deaf persons since the late 18th century, when the Abbé de l'Epée devised a system of artificial signs for use with students in his school at Paris. Laurent Clerc, one of the graduates of the Paris school, was recruited in 1816 by Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet to become the first teacher of the deaf in America. Clerc adopted de l'Epée's system for use with American students. The system was used in most American schools for the deaf for several decades. Forty years ago, Sir Richard Paget developed a system for use with deaf children in Britain. Still used today in a revised and expanded form, it is known as the Paget-Gorman system. In Sweden, a system incorporating Swedish signs and the spoken language is on the drawing boards. In America, there are, at the least, four major published sign systems currently in use: Seeing Essential English, Signing Exact English, Linguistics of Visual English, and Signed English. Many educational programs use parts of one or more of these systems as they see fit.

The historical and current systems are not attempts to develop an independent universal language. The individual systems are, in fact, very specific to a particular spoken language, developers in each country viewing them as tools to teach the language of the culture to deaf children. At this time, research results are not available to indicate whether or not this objective is achieved. It is true that these systems, used extensively in the classroom, tend to be limited to educational uses. While deaf people may be aware of such developments, they do not use the "new signs" to converse among themselves.

A brief explanation of how the American systems work is appropriate here. Intended to represent English visually, these systems arrange signs in the order of English words and incorporate in this arrangement invented signs which correspond to grammatical features and vocabulary items of the English language. By matching a sign to an English language component, part-for-part, the systems become codes for English.

For most people, mention of the word "code" brings to mind Morse code. The comparison is not far-fetched, because in principle, all codes set up a one-to-one correspondence between a language unit and a symbol. In Morse code, the dot-dash forms (the code symbols) correspond with letters of the alphabet. Sign systems are structurally far more complicated, their code symbols (signs) corresponding to larger units of the English language.