Over 500.000 Europeans are born deaf and one million people use sign language. People who are
deaf since childhood rarely master the oral language, written and spoken. Their favourite language,
often the only one, is a signed language. These are languages in their own right, able to convey any
meaning and bring along ...
(Show more)Over 500.000 Europeans are born deaf and one million people use sign language. People who are
deaf since childhood rarely master the oral language, written and spoken. Their favourite language,
often the only one, is a signed language. These are languages in their own right, able to convey any
meaning and bring along history, memory and culture. Both deaf people and their languages have
been heavily discriminated. Only in the late twentieth century was the linguisticity of signed
languages rediscovered, leading to a more mature claim of deaf people’s rights.
Deaf signing communities in Europe have only recently started to be perceived as linguistic and
cultural minorities, and their languages are being claimed now as part of the linguistic and cultural
heritage of mainstream European societies.
In the recent Italian history it has been thought that citizens should bow to a supposed natural
national identity and the country should identify with one language. Such misled sense of
belonging, have imposed a subtractive bilingualism on deaf people, while paving the way for the
relegation of their language and culture to a position of inferiority and disrepute. There was a logic
according to which deviances had to be eliminated or hidden, in order to be recognized as part of
the community.
The willingness emerged in the last decades, to accept the different other, is an expression of an
internal cultural identity. However no serious attempt has been made to recover the memory of this
linguistic minority, which cannot rely on writing but only on face-to-face communication or video
technologies to entrust its own memory. It is a fragile memory. At the same time it is a minority,
socially weak and strongly discriminated against memory. However, recovering a common memory
has been one of the determinants for advancing deaf people’s rights.
This paper aims to analyze the theoretical and methodological issues related to Sign[ed] History and
its potential to claim rights and participation. In order to manage different language and social
dynamics we propose thath some typical instruments of oral history research, such as unstructured interviews and Grounded Theory, it might be helpful to go beyond the hegemonic reproductive approach and the 'paradox of oral history' (and the 'paradox of Deaf studies). However, within this set of practices it has been possible to identify the need of not only providing counseling spaces for the “unheard voices”, but also of making the “untold narratives” come to light through engaging initiatives open to the community.
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