- by Hugh Young (1993)

- 1400 words

"We want our language on television, the language we can understand."

Remember News Review, the weekly news programme for the Deaf in sign language? Hilary McCormack, vice-president of the New Zealand Association for the Deaf, says Deaf people were stunned when it was taken off the air two years ago.

Yet New Zealand On Air spends a million dollars a year on television for Deaf and hearing impaired people. Half of that was spent on adding Teletext captions to programmes. A survey was carried out to find out how Deaf people wanted the other half to be spent.

According to sign language interpreter Tony Swindell of Christchurch, that survey was "totally amok".

NZOA went to considerable trouble to contact Deaf people throughout the country. But Swindell says most of the survey was carried out using printed forms.

"In a lot of places there were no interpreters present. NZ On Air expected Deaf people to read fully and understand what that survey was asking, and we know that Deaf people can't read and write to the same level as hearing people." The report says the questions and ramifications were explained at meetings "with the help of an interpreter."

The questioning would have been hard enough for very literate people to follow, it was explained only part way through that a vote for Teletext would mean no signing, and five options were given, splitting the vote for signing. Added together, 54 percent of first choices were for signed programmes compared to 27 percent for nothing but Teletext captioning, and at least 83 per cent gave signed programmes as their first or second choices.

Yet the report said the results were "overwhelmingly clear. Fully 52 percent of respondents noted teletext captioning as being their first or second choice." Those who gave Teletext as their second choice could hardly have realised that by doing so they were voting against their first choice, signing.

TVNZ immediately canned News Review. Swindell says "Deaf people all over New Zealand were just devastated, and it's still a talking point now, two years down the track. They say, 'What's happened? When are we going to get it back?'"

McCormack says, "It's been a running sore with us.

"We used to have half an hour on Sunday mornings, compared to three hours of Maori programmes (which we are sincerely pleased about, we congratulate Maori people on achieving that).

"We're only asking for a half hour a week, just to start with. Captioning on the six o'clock news is appreciated very much, but it's not enough. TVNZ and New Zealand On Air should accept that New Zealand Sign Language is a genuine native New Zealand language, and it should be on TV, accepted by TV as a right for Deaf people to have their native language. For many deaf people that's all they have."

(McCormack herself can speak, but I need Swindell's help to follow her.)

As if to add insult to injury, "Issues" presented a parody of sign language -- during Deaf Awareness Week -- and the segment was repeated in the final "Best of 'Issues'" programme.

New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL) has been "spoken" for over a hundred years. It developed out of British Sign Language (BSL), brought here by Dorcas Mitchell, tutor to a family of Deaf children in Charteris Bay in the 1870s. BSL can be traced back another 300 years and probably has an unrecorded history as long as that of English. American Sign Language (ASL or Ameslan) is a completely different language.

Marianne Ahlgren proved in her 1985 PhD thesis that NZSL is a fully-fledged language, with a large vocabulary of signs and a consistent grammar of space. It is not just mime or gesture. Many signs are iconic -- they look like their meanings, corresponding to onomatopoeic English words like "scratch" or "smooth". (To sign "cat" one hand strokes the back of the other, to sign "child" you pat its imaginary head.) But many are not, just as most English words are arbitrary sounds. ("Electricity" involves flicking the thumb and third finger under the chin.) Sign order is different from English word-order, and some English concepts are conveyed by the placement or movement of signs.

Robert Cameron of Lower Hutt is one Deaf person who has a strong preference for captions on television, on two grounds: sign language would annoy Hearing people, and the different dialects of NZSL would create disagreements between Deaf people.

Kay Drew, a long-time teacher of deaf children at Van Asch College in Christchurch, has a short answer to the first objection: "Oh, stuff Hearing people!" And she agreed with the suggestion that "If they don't like it, they should watch the radio!" Like Tony Swindell, she is a hearing child of Deaf parents, which gives her a strong empathy for Deaf people.

Hilary McCormack says that, far from annoying the Hearing, "we know that it creates a lot of awareness among Hearing people to actually see sign language on television."

Deaf people disagree about the seriousness of the dialect problem. NZSL has evolved into three dialects, based on the three Schools for the Deaf; Van Asch, St Dominics at Fielding, and Kelston/Titirangi in Auckland. Part of the reason for that is that until the late 1970s, NZSL was forbidden in the schools, and there was no encouragement for the three groups to communicate with each other. NZSL's development has been entirely clandestine among the largest gatherings of Deaf speakers, school children.

News Review, originating in Christchurch, was entirely in the Van Asch dialect, which caused some complaint in Auckland.

But the three dialects have the same spatial grammar -- the past, for example, is behind the speaker, the future in front -- and differ mainly in vocabulary. A dictionary now being compiled at Victoria University of Wellington will catalogue those differences, making it possible for interpreters to choose the most widely and easily understood variants.

Not all Deaf people are as literate as Cameron, literacy having been one casualty of the struggle to teach Deaf people to talk. Also, many Deaf people have poorly paying jobs or none, and can not afford Teletext.

"You must understand that deaf people aren't stupid," says McCormack, "but because they were grossly underresourced throughout their education, that and the communication difficulty, and the fact that education was always trying to make them speak, that all squeezed out other education."

Even when they can read the words, Deaf people have a problem extracting their meaning. English is a rich brew of idioms. Even a commonplace endearment like "Honey" can confuse someone who has never heard it and knows only the sweet and sticky kind.

Deaf people often write in an English stripped of inflexions, articles and prepositions. Teletext captions, though efficiently compressed, are written more for the hearing-impaired and the post-lingually deaf (those who could speak before they went deaf) than for the (pre-lingually) Deaf community. Although a recommendation of the report was that captions should be in English that Deaf people can follow, that has not happened.

There is a residue of sign language on television, on programmes such as Sesame St, but that is American Sign Language (ASL), a completely foreign language that can only confuse New Zealand Deaf children. If that becomes commonplace, it could corrupt NZSL -- just as most New Zealand children now call the last letter of the alphabet "zee" -- but worse, because there is so little other sign language to be seen.

It is estimated that 5,500 New Zealanders over 14 have a hearing loss of 85 decibels or more -- but that gives no indication of how many use NZSL.

"I do feel very strongly that the money that TVNZ are putting into captioning is only half of their responsiblity," says McCormack. "It ignores the other half, the people who use NZSL and can't read the captions. They have no other option for acquiring language.

"We don't want to come across as a pack of moaners. We are getting somewhere, but we need support. We're past anger, we're not into that. That's past history now. We've had a gutsful of complaining, we want to go forward.

"We just want equity. Television is the only visual medium available for our language. We want more of it, lots more of it."

Deaf people use a capital D to indicate membership of the Deaf community, especially their use of sign language. In the same way, "Hearing" can refer to an attitude as well as the state of the ears - a tendency of people who hear to patronise or overbear Deaf people. 

1998: Since I wrote that, the publication of the Dictionary of New Zealand Sign Language has raised the profile of NZSL, but there is still none on television. 

broadcast on NZ National Radio
October 12, 1997
- 616 words
3'25"
 

Deafness Awareness Week has been and gone again, and - calloo, callay! - for a few seconds, we saw New Zealand Sign Language on television. That's the first time in five years, but for one news item a couple of years ago about the long-awaited NZSL dictionary. According to the latest census, 26 and a half thousand people speak - for want of a better word - NZSL, making it our eighth most spoken language, not far behind Dutch, German, and Cantonese, and ahead of Tongan.

Actually, I'm skeptical: New Zealand Sign Language is the natural language of New Zealand Deaf people, and it's not easy to learn well enough to discuss, as the census put it, a number of different subjects. I suspect many of those 26 and a half thousand didn't understand the question.

New Zealand On Air is convinced it fulfils its commitment to Deaf people by subtitling more and more programmes, but subtitles require fluency in written English, a very difficult language even for hearing people. Many profoundly deaf people are not fluent, don't have well-paid jobs, and because of that, can't afford Teletext.

I said "profoundly deaf" but I should have said "prelingually deaf" - those who were deaf before they could speak - people we used to call "deaf and dumb". There is a vast cultural chasm between prelingually and post-lingually deaf people, accurately reflected in the names of their two organisations, the Deaf Association and the Hearing Association. Their umbrella group, The Foundation for the Deaf, is almost inevitably biassed towards the latter, people with hearing loss, hearing impairment, and late-onset deafness, who are still part of your and my hearing culture. Year after year, so-called Deafness Awareness Week has focussed on the horrors of not hearing.

That is not how prelingually Deaf people see it. They no more miss hearing sound than you and I miss hearing every ultrasonic squeak of bats, or seeing in the ultraviolet as bees do. The idea of technological fixes of their deafness, such as cochlear implants, fills them with the same kind of horror that you or I would feel, if benevolent bats or dogs offered to modify us surgically to make us hear what they can.

What Deaf people miss is the communication sounds provide in the culture that we hearing people have made for ourselves; in all-Deaf environments such as the Deaf clubs, or Gallaudet University in Washington, or the isolated community that flourished for many years on Martha's Vineyard, Deaf people are not handicapped at all. Hearing people are.

Deaf people are a linguistic community in New Zealand, one that will never assimilate, and they are entitled to the use of their own language, in the only mass medium that can transmit it, television. Who would be hurt by an interpreter in a cameo in the corner of the screen, especially when so much of TV news is non-visual, talking heads? Not only would it keep Deaf people up to date with current events, but it would raise hearing New Zealanders' consciousness about this beautiful, very special, language - New Zealand's only other indigenous language.

New Zealand Sign Language is in danger. In less than two years, Deaf people will be able to sign to each other via the Internet all over the world - and the majority will use American Sign Language, which is a quite different langage from NZSL. A generation of Deaf children will grow up unable to talk to Deaf adults. So NZSL should be seen on television, regularly, now.

But shouldn't all Deaf people use the same sign language, many people ask. Sure, and shouldn't hearing people all use the same spoken language (Cantonese, perhaps)? After you.

I'm told I shouldn't actually have said "prelingually" either: Some people who are now (culturally) Deaf went (audiologically) deaf after they could speak. Complicated, eh!

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