The deaf community and the signing community

NGT is the sign language used by members of the deaf community in The Netherlands. Members of deaf communities “share a common language, common experiences and values and a common way of interacting with each other and with hearing people” (Baker & Padden, 1978, p. 4).² As such, the Dutch deaf community is a sociolinguistic minority group embedded within the larger Dutch society, as illustrated in Figure 2.1a. However, as can also be

2 Cultural values and traditions may include greeting rituals, parting rituals, attention-getting strategies, ensuring communication, sharing information, behavioral norms regarding eye contact patterns, touching and facial expression, humor, and expression of art (e.g., Padden & Humphries, 1988; Reagan, 1995; Lane, Hoffmeister & Bahan, 1996).

seen in Figure 2.1a, only a part of the larger group of deaf³ and hard-of-hearing people identify as members of the deaf community. People who do not self-identify as members of the deaf community are mostly people who lost their hearing in their adulthood (for example, due to over-exposure to noise, an accident or sickness), as well as people who were born deaf but who were raised orally, which implies that they prefer to communicate by means of spoken language and lip-reading. There is thus (i) a group of deaf and hard-of-hearing people who identify primarily with the hearing society and do not share the values of the deaf community, and (ii) a group of deaf and hard-of-hearing people who self-identify (and are identified by others) as members of a cultural (minority) group, the deaf community. Moreover, there is (iii) a small group of hearing people who identify as members of the deaf community, for example, hearing children of deaf adults (often referred to by the acronym Coda or the term heritage signers (Roy, Brunson & Stone, 2018; Reynolds, 2018)), who are raised with the language, values and beliefs of the deaf community, or life partners of deaf community members. Ladd (2003) refers to these hearing people as ‘fringe members’ of the community (indicated with the striped pattern in Figure 2.1a).⁴

3 Within the fields of sign language linguistics and Deaf Studies, many authors use

‘Deaf’ with a capital D to refer to the group of people who identify as members of the deaf community and who use sign language, as opposed to ‘deaf’ with a lowercase d to refer to people who “share the condition of not hearing, [but] do not have access to the knowledge, beliefs, and practices that make up the culture of Deaf people” (Padden & Humphries, 1988, p. 2). The orthographic distinction distinguishes deafness as the medical condition of not hearing from Deafness as a cultural phenomenon. Recently, an increasing number of (deaf) scholars (e.g., Friedner & Kusters, 2015; Roy, Brunson & Stone, 2018; De Meulder, Murray &

McKee, 2019) chose to give up this binary distinction, and instead use the more encompassing, less politicized, and less context-dependent lowercase ‘deaf’ to refer to all deaf people. In this thesis, we follow this practice and use lowercase d throughout.

4 Within the scholarly field (e.g., Baker-Schenk & Cokely, 1980a; Napier, 2002; Leigh

& Andrews, 2016), hearing people such as children of deaf parents are – to a point – accepted as members of the deaf community. We did not find any author who explicitly excludes this group from membership (but see Friedner & Kusters, 2015).

However, on social media and fora one can find lay people who advocate that hearing individuals can never be considered members of the deaf community (see for an example https://www.quora.com/Is-a-hearing-person-considered-part-of-the-deaf-community-if-they-sign).

To avoid using ‘hearing status’ or ‘nativeness’ as a criterion, some authors (e.g., Johnston & Schembri, 2007; Klomp, in preparation) distinguish the deaf community on the one hand and the signing community on the other. The deaf community only includes people who self-identify (and are identified by others) as having a deaf identity, whereas the signing community subsumes members of the deaf community as well as deaf people who have acquired sign language, but do not self-identify as deaf community member, and hearing people who know sign language, such as hearing family members or acquaintances of deaf people, professionals who work with deaf people, or sign language students (Figure 2.1b).⁵

There is a paucity of survey data on how many Dutch people are deaf or hard-of-hearing, on how many of them consider themselves members of the deaf community, and on how many hearing individuals use NGT. There are various estimates by different organizations regarding these numbers (for a comprehensive overview, see Klomp (in preparation)). The EUD (2019) estimates the number of deaf NGT-users to be 15,000 individuals, whereas Cokart, Schermer, Tijsseling & Westerhoff (2019) estimate that the size of the signing community (i.e., deaf and hearing NGT-users with different levels of proficiency) is 60,000 people.

Sign languages differ from spoken languages with regard to the way the language is maintained and transmitted to the next generations, since only a small part of deaf children have a deaf parent as language role model.⁶ As a consequence, only a small number of deaf children learn a sign language through intergenerational transmission. Instead, the language is commonly transmitted by peers (Lane, 1995). Historically, important cornerstones of the deaf community were deaf clubs and (residential) schools for the deaf, since these were the places where the language could be transmitted from one generation to the other or among peers (Woll & Ladd, 2003; Compton, 2014; Barberà et al., 2019). The role of the deaf schools in the Netherlands will be further discussed in Section 2.2.3.

5 Some authors refer to this group as ‘(non-deaf) allies’. The first mention of the term

‘allies’ is attributed to Paddy Ladd by Komesaroff and McLean (2006). However, we were not able to track down Ladd’s publication that Komesaroff and McLean refer to.

6 The estimated number of deaf children that are born to deaf parents (in the U.S.) is 5% (Mitchell & Karchmer, 2004).

Figure 2.1. Schematic representations of the deaf community (a) and the signing community (b).