“Go figure!!! I used to think that all deaf people spoke the same language”
This phrase is often repeated when talking about deafness with people that don’t know much about it.
It often goes along with the phrase:” Well if they already have one language, why are they not using it?” To which I always answer:” How come you don’t only speak English, instead of Spanish?”
A language isn’t created, it evolves or gets developed. It is impossible to determine the date of the creation of a language. If needed, we could get an approximate time, for example: the foundation of RAE (Royal Spanish Academy) in 1731. But this doesn’t mean that before that date Spanish didn’t exist. In Germany, the first edition of Luther’s bible in 1534 is a reference point as well. This doesn’t mean that German is older than Spanish, only that different referential dates were considered.
The same happens with sign language. In Spain, the first school for the deaf was established in 1802, but years before Francisco De Goya had already drawn several pictures depicting his era’s sign language. Therefore, it can’t be said that sign languages are “created”.
It is true that here are influences and evolutions. For example: Eighteen century French and Spanish sign language were very much alike. In 1817 Laurent Clerc traveled to the United States to establish a school specifically for the deaf, but he taught in French sign language, thus American deaf people communicated in French.
This language evolved and distanced itself from French until it became what we now call the American Sign Language. In the twentieth century the United States influence over Latin America helped their sign language to propagate amongst different nations. But at the same time with the passing of years the evolution of the sign language in each country was different.
Thus, for example, in Ecuador, the Ecuadorian Sign Language has in it 20% of the American Sign Language, but it also has an important percentage from the Spanish Sign Language, because it was brought here by Christian missions during the seventeenth century.
Let’s not forget that languages refer to the realities we know, that’s why each and every one of them evolves differently, even within the same country. A New Yorker doesn’t speak the same as someone from Texas, neither does a person from London speak like someone from Birmingham.
In this video we see a French deaf person and a Japanese one showing signs in their own languages.
https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=375831905923534
