Redefining D.E.A.F Essay Example

used very degrading terms to describe deaf people they were judging them wrongly since most of deaf people grew up without any education. The fact that all these people wrote about them, Cammeron says, it brings this false ideology to our present. Nonetheless, people like William C. Stokoe Jr. introduced sing language to many people and presented it as a valuable source for communication as any other language. Stokoe spent big part of his life studying English and trying to prove that sign language was a real language and not “a collection of meaningless gestures or pantomimes”.

Besides, in 1965 Stokoe along with his research team in the Gallaudet College published the book “The Dictionary of American Sign Language Structure” was the first one to have big public attention and a little bit more the ideology of society at that time. Sign Language is contemporarily recognized as a natural and native language because of its base on culturally known gestures and its everyday use. However, historically there are always cultural pressures that deaf people goes thru in where they are force to behave in a certain way that might not be the most natural to them.

In every society there is a certain mixture of ethnicities and there is a constant fight between tradition and assimilation. I personally was born in Uruguay, South America; I leaved most of my life surrounded with its culture and in the last four years that fight has been internally in me. Another example is the proven case that most African Americans have a different sign language than other ASL speakers. It was the case of Carolyn McCaskill

when in 1968 she was enrolled in the integrated school for deaf people in Talledega, Ala.

In her life time she not only noticed the difference between the two but also realized studies where now it can be officially recognized. This can also be translated to all the diverse cultural differences that we can find along one society. In the current world with the globalization phenomenon ideologies all over are constantly changing. Ryan Commerson’s idea of starting to use the medias, now more accessible to all of us than ever, to make a change on people perceptions is not a mistake at all. We are actually in a position to create awareness in a scale never seen before.

In my case is just a start but is exciting to see if in the near future we can all learn from sign language as a valuable source of communication.