Pioneer plans town for sign language users
Marvin T. Miller plans to start a town in South Dakota for users of American Sign Language. Deaf since birth and the co-founder of the first national deaf newspaper, he has dreamed of a community based on sign language communication since his youth. Laurent, named after Laurent Clerc, a French educator from the 1800's who founded the first school for the deaf in the United States, would be the first town started in the region in well over 100 years.
As I've noted before, Martha's Vineyard was a deaf community in the 1800s. The Minneapolis Star Tribune mentions this from a slightly different perspective:
What I've read previously indicated that sign language usage was so well-integrated that residents were not so much obligated to learn (read: burdened with the chore of communicating with the Other) but enjoyed all the benefits of bilingualism that anyone in a foreign country would.Laurent would not be the nation's first deaf community. More than 200 years ago off the Massachusetts coast, a group of European settlers on the island of Martha's Vineyard carried a gene for deafness and produced generations of children who could not hear.
By the 19th century, one village on Martha's Vineyard had so many deaf residents that even those who could hear had to learn sign language to succeed there.
While the culture on Martha's Vineyard resulted from heredity and geographical isolation of the time, there have been concentrations of deaf residents in many regions since then. But nothing quite so deliberately planned has been achieved before. From the NYT:
The difference in Laurent, say some among the 92 families who have reserved spaces in the town from as far as London and Australia, is that every element of it would be designed with them in mind. The homes and businesses, they said, would incorporate glass and open space for easy visibility across wide distances. Fire and police services would be designed with more lights and fewer sirens. High-speed Internet connections would be available all over town, since the Internet and Video Relay Service have become vital modes of communication for deaf people. And any shops, businesses or restaurants would be required to be sign-language friendly.
Not everyone interested in living in Laurent is deaf, though Miller, his wife and four children all are. Most deaf children are born to hearing adults, and education of deaf children -- with the frustrating tension between public school language barriers and special school seclusion -- is a primary motivation for Miller. Not surprisingly, fierce debate centers around whether deaf people should integrate more fully into society or exclude themselves with enclaves like Laurent hopes to be. Often, this argument depends on whether deafness is seen as a medical condition of the individual ("curable" for some through cochlear implants) or as a culture to be celebrated. Laurent is obviously a cultural project and as planning continues, progress can be followed on Marvin's Laurent, SD, blog, added to my sidebar at right.
2 comments:
I recently stumbled across your blog, and I LOVE it!!!! Keep up the good work for yourself, myself and other people with disabilities everywhere!
During my younger years I used to go on a lot of lad’s holidays! Usual places, Magaluf, Ibiza and so on, but during the last couple of years we starting going to the Greek Islands more often, Kos, Zante, Malia were our regular haunts. If you know anything about the Greek police it is that they don’t like speaking English and won’t think twice about hitting you with a baton if they see fit. So I decided to learn Greek, only the basics so if anything kicked off I could communicate with them and hopefully calm the situation! I did it using a book and speaking to some Greek lads from my uni but it could have been quicker using a learning language online software.
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