Today it is September 23, and that means that it is International Day of Sign Languages, proclaimed as such by the General Assembly of the United Nations. This year, Lingoblog searched in vain for an expert in sign languages for the deaf to celebrate this with us. Peter Bakker fills in this year with a special sign language: Irish Sign Language, the only sign language for the deaf that has a so-called genderlect.
Irish sign language developed around schools for deaf girls and boys in the 1800s. It is documented that there were sign languages before that time as well in Ireland, but they were probably quite different across the country. When Irish deaf people were no longer kept at home but assembled together in schools for the deaf, the sign languages of the boys and the girls both homogenized. Indeed, stable sign languages emerged, and in this case, one on each school.
The history of the sign languages that developed around the two schools for the deaf in Ireland is special. Today, there is a unified sign language in Ireland, but there are still a few signs that are only used by women. Those are a relic of the earlier situation in which two different sign languages coexisted, both connected to different schools, one for boys and one for girls. This phenomenon, where men and women categorically use different words/signs, particles, etc., is called a genderlect. The term genderlect is sometimes also used for statistical differences between genders, like women using more standard language forms or more terms for colours. But in the meaning used here, the differences are systematic and categorical. Women speak like this, and men like that. It is of course not impossible for women to use men’s forms or the other way around. Yet, if the wrong forms are used, people may feel inclined to comment on it, as a breaking of a rule, or as a means to signal a specific message, for instance power or a certain sexual orientation.
The phenomenon of genderlects is not common in the world. They are mostly found in the Americas, and they are almost completely absent in Africa and among the indigenous populations of Australia. There are over a hundred known cases on the globe, but it is still a rare phenomenon when you keep in mind that there are over 7,000 languages. Irish Sign Language is the only one known sign language with a genderlect. How could this happen?
Let us first give a few examples. Here are some pictures which we cite from an article by Barbara LeMaster in Visual Anthropology Review. The signs for ‘night’, ‘use’ and ‘mouse’ are clearly very different, as you can see.
What happened? In Ireland, there were separate schools for deaf boys and girls. That was of course not uncommon in the world. Many countries had separate schools for boys and girls, perhaps especially Catholic countries like Ireland. A separate school for girls was established in Dublin in 1846, and it existed as such till 1946. A school for deaf boys followed in 1857, and it continued its existence till 1959. The schools were located only a few kilometres apart, but that did not mean that the boys and girls interacted regularly with one another. Both schools were residential schools. Elsewhere in Ireland, there were also gender-segregated schools for non-deaf people, but English-speaking boys and girls (and those who spoke Irish) would have interacted with siblings of the other sex in the home, during social activities and at many other occasions where they spoke pre-existing languages. It is well known that deaf children are often the only ones in a family, except when there is an inheritable condition. It is estimated that 90 % of deaf children are born in families with hearing parents. Those deaf children may develop home sign systems, and a fully developed sign language is acquired at institutions like schools and preschools.
The Irish deaf developed sign languages around the schools, independently from the other, in the 1800s. Few social activities existed that would enable contact with children of the opposite sex in school age. The Dominican sisters who started the girls’ school introduced a number of signs from French Sign Language, which they had learned in France at a special stay intended to getting familiar with a sign language. When the boys’ schools was established, a new independent sign language developed. Both of these sign languages were influenced by (undocumented) older forms of one or more Irish sign languages. The sign languages were reportedly so different, that the boys and the girls could not understand one another. Obviously, as adults they met, and when women and men married each other, they learned to understand each other’s sign languages. Men often claimed to know the female signs, and indeed their passive knowledge was good, but they appeared quite poor in producing them when asked to do so.
Such a situation of virtually separate socialization of the sexes in which a new language had to develop is of course quite rare, but in such a situation, the result is quite unsurprising. In recent decades the situation has changed in that the women have taken over the men’s signs, and the male signs were the ones that were transmitted to the younger generations.
In many cases, the signs with roughly the same meaning would have widely divergent forms. But the opposite was also the case: there were sign that were the same for men and women, but the meanings were different. For instance, the female sign for ‘soldier’ and the male sign for ‘sister’ were the same. It is said that sign language was used by all in these schools for the deaf, which was not common in that period, and this led to rather fixed forms of both varieties. Also, the hearing teachers used sign language with each other, providing a very good environment for the consolidation and transmission of the two sign languages.
In 1977 a group of deaf women and men got together to produce a dictionary of Irish Sign Language. One challenge was obviously the existence of female and male signs. In almost all cases of different signs, the female sign was considered ugly or less good than the men’s version. Rather than recognizing both versions, variation was eliminated, often in favour of the male sign.
This has all led to a diminished use of the female signs, now limited to a few signs used in all-female conversations. There have been attempts by young signers, however, to reactivate the genderlect. The female signs were, until a few decades ago, still sometimes used in female-to-female conversations, but probably this rare phenomenon of a signed genderlect has by now disappeared from Ireland and from the planet.
Further reading:
LeMaster, Barbara. 1999-2000. Reappropriation of gendered Irish Sign Language in one family. Visual Anthropology Review 15(2): 69–83.
Cover photo: colourbox.dk, modified.
Peter Bakker once became part of a family where sign language was used by several family members. He followed courses in Dutch Sign Language, which he acquired at a basic level. Until a number of years ago, he organized summer university courses in Deaf Studies, taught in sign language. He works as a linguist at Aarhus University. Sometimes he reviews books about Plains Sign Language. His grammatical sketch of this language is not nearing completion.
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