Historical background of NGT

NGT can be considered a relatively young language,⁸ which historically was highly concentrated around the five schools for the deaf in the Netherlands.

These schools were established between 1790 and 1911. Like other Western European countries, the Netherlands saw a rise of oralism in the late nineteenth century: deaf children were educated through the use of speech

7 For an overview of different systems of manual communication, see Pfau (2012) and Senghas & Monaghan (2002).

8 In general, (Western urban) sign languages are considered young languages that emerged during the Industrial Revolution, when groups of people migrated from rural areas to the city. This provided an opportunity for deaf people, who formerly lived in isolation, to gather and create social groups where sign languages could emerge (e.g., McBurney, 2012).

and lip-reading, and the use of signs was prohibited.⁹ Often deaf children were physically punished when caught signing. Despite this ban on signing, deaf children used signs secretely on the playgrounds and in the residential dormitories, serving as linguistic role models for their younger peers. From the 1980s onwards, educational approaches within the schools for the deaf gradually changed for the better, with the introduction of Total Communication during the period 1980–1995, whereby signs were recognized as a means of communication and Sign-supported Dutch was used as means of instruction.¹⁰ This was followed by the implementation of bilingual education during the following decade (Van den Bogaerde &

Schermer, 2007). Yet, this so-called ‘golden age’ came to an end at the beginning of the twenty-first century, when the schools for the deaf started to shift away from the bilingual approach towards the use of Sign-supported Dutch or Dutch. This change in language policy was a direct result of an increased number of young deaf children with cochlear implants, and the recommendation of the medical professionals to only use spoken language in the communication with these children.¹¹ Another development that contributes to the decline in the use of NGT among young deaf children is the current inclusion philosophy, which propagates children to be mainstreamed in regular classrooms.¹² These developments have serious

9 Tijsseling (2014) points out that the rise of oralism in the Netherlands was not a direct result of the resolution that was adopted during the International Congress on the Education of the Deaf held in Milan in 1880, in which the use of signs in education was rejected (Lane et al., 1996). In fact, two schools had already introduced the oralist method some decennia before the Milan Congress, and two other schools, founded in 1888 and 1911, respectively, adopted an oralist approach from the start.

10 Please note that it was not the schools, but the parents of young deaf children, who initiated the use of signs in the communication with their children. When these children entered the schools, their communicative competence was greater than that of the non-sign-exposed children of the previous cohorts (Schermer, 2012a).

11 A cochlear implant (CI) is a surgically implanted hearing device that stimulates the auditory nerves via electric stimulation. For an elaborate overview of cochlear implants and their implications, see Blume (2010). Often, medical professionals stress the importance of auditory training, and parents do not always receive information that includes the use of sign language as an option.

12 The Dutch government passed a law in 2012 (Wet Passend Onderwijs, ‘law on appropriate education’), which imposes a ‘duty of care’ for regular schools to offer

implications for the preservation of NGT, since schools for the deaf have traditionally been important sites for language transmission (see Sections 2.2.1 and 2.2.5).

The educational approaches described above have greatly affected the way society and deaf people themselves viewed sign language and deafness.

During the ‘oral period’, both deaf and hearing people had a tendency not to regard the signs used by deaf people as sign language in a linguistic sense.

Deafness was commonly seen as a ‘deficit’, not as a positive trait (Van den Bogaerde & Schermer, 2007). The gradual awareness of the existence of a

‘deaf identity’ and of the fact that NGT is a language in its own right is attributable to different interacting global forces during the 1960s and the 1970s. Firstly, the emerging field of sign language linguistics (see Section 2.1) started to provide evidence that sign languages were natural human languages. Secondly, the civil rights movement during the 1960s empowered deaf people to stand up against systematic social injustice and to claim their rights as a cultural and linguistic minority group (Lane, 1995; Woll & Ladd, 2003; Bauman, 2008). These ‘deaf advocacy’ practices have resulted in an increase in social acceptance and recognition of sign languages both in academic circles and in society.

Over the last four decades, considerable efforts have been made to promote the use of NGT, to document the language, and to raise its status in society (Van den Bogaerde & Schermer, 2007; Schermer, 2012a; Cokart et al., 2019). Important developments since the 1980s are:

(i) The publication of a basic descriptive grammar (Schermer, Fortgens, Harder & De Nobel, 1991);¹³

(ii) The publication of dictionaries, both in book-form and online;

(iii) Various dissertations on the use and structure of NGT; of particular importance was Schermer’s (1990) dissertation, as it is an early investigation into the linguistic status of NGT;

(iv) The standardization and expansion of the lexicon (STABOL-project, see Schermer, 2012b);

appropriate education for all children per August 2014. One of the basic aims formulated by the government is that “every child will attend a mainstream school, or if that is not possible, a special school” (Government of the Netherlands, 2019).

13 Currently, two descriptive grammars of NGT are being prepared by Klomp (in preparation) and Bos & De Nobel (in preparation).

(v) The development of national NGT course materials;

(vi) The development of pedagogical materials in NGT (De Klerk, Fortgens & Van der Eijk, 2015);

(vii) The improvement of NGT literacy by teaching sign language as a subject in schools for the deaf;

(viii) The establishment of programs that teach NGT as a subject in tertiary education (e.g., bachelor and master Sign Language Linguistics at the University of Amsterdam);

(ix) The establishment of bachelor and master programs to educate interpreters and teachers of NGT at UUAS;

(x) The installation of chairs for NGT at University of Amsterdam and Radboud University Nijmegen;

(xi) The compilation of a language corpus (Corpus NGT, Crasborn, Zwitserlood & Ros, 2008);

(xii) Increased visibility of NGT in the media;

(xiii) The development of online NGT courses; and

(xiv) The development of tests to assess L1 (Hermans, Knoors &

Verhoeven, 2007, 2010) and L2 proficiency (Boers-Visker, Poor &

Van den Bogaerde, 2015).

This rather long, but by no means exhaustive, list illustrates the current vitality of the language. Yet, there are concerns about the future of the language (see Section 2.2.5). The next section discusses the state of affairs regarding the (legal) status of NGT (Section 2.2.4), followed by an elaboration on the (global) endangerment of sign languages and the (positive and negative) role of second language learners in this process (Section 2.2.5).