topics: |  sign-linguistics | deaf

In the nineteenth century, one American in every 5,728 was born deaf, but
on the Vineyard the figure was one in every 155.  p.3

Deafness is considered one of the most severe and widespread of the major
disabilities. In the United States alone, 14.2 million people have some
hearing impairment that is severe enough to interfere with their ability to
communicate; of these, 2 million are considered deaf (National Center for
Health Statistics 1982).

A deaf person's greatest problem is not simply that he or she cannot hear but
that the lack of hearing is socially isolating. The deaf person's knowledge
and awareness of the larger society are limited because hearing people find
it difficult or impossible to communicate with him or her. Even if the deaf
person knows sign language, only a very small percentage of the hearing
population can speak it and can communicate easily with deaf people. The
difficulty in communicating, along with the ignorance and misinformation
about deafness that is pervasive in most of the hearing world, combine to
cause difficulties in all aspects of life for deaf individuals-in education,
employment, community involvement, and civil rights.

On the Vineyard, however, the hearing people were bilingual in
English and the Island sign language. This adaptation had more than
linguistic significance, for it eliminated the wall that separates most
deaf people from the rest of society. How well can deaf people integrate
themselves into the community if no communication barriers exist and
if everyone is familiar and comfortable with deafness? The evidence
from the Island indicates that they are extremely successful at this.

One of the strongest indications that the deaf were completely integrated
into all aspects of society is that in all the interviews I conducted,
deaf Islanders were never thought of or referred to as a group
or as "the deaf." Everyone of the deaf people who is remembered
today is thought of as a unique individual. 

When I inquired about "the deaf" or asked informants to list all the deaf
people they had known, most could remember only one or two, although many of
them had known more than that. I was able to elicit comments about specific
individuals only by reading informants a list of all the deaf people known to
have lived on the Island. My notes show a good example of this when, in an
interview with a woman who is now in her early nineties: 

I asked, "Do you know anything similar about Isaiah and David?"

"Oh yes!" she replied. "They both were very good fishermen, very good
indeed." 

"Weren't they both deaf?" I prodded.

"Yes, come to think of it, I guess they both were," she replied. "I'd
forgotten about that." p.4

Alexander Graham Bell : History of deafness on Martha's Vineyard

In the 1880s, when Alexander Graham Bell was a professor of elocution at
  Boston University, he had investigated the Vineyard, as part of a project
investigating whether deafness was inherited.

[After some difficulty, Groce is able to access Bell's extensive notes John
Hitz Memorial Library, part of the Alexander Graham Bell Foundation in
Washington, D.C., where his notes were found packed away in storage in a
warehouse.]

Bell was never able to explain why hearing parents sometimes had several deaf
children, and vice versa. Because of this failure he eventually abandoned the
study of Island genetics, although not before he had amassed a considerable
amount of information on the subject, and had made an extensive list of all
those Islanders known to have been deaf. p.8-9

[As told in Oliver Sacks' Seeing Voices,
Bell opposed the use of Sign Language in deaf education, although both his
mother and wife were deaf and he was a very provificient at SL. ]


Ebenezar and Thankful Hamblin, both hearing.  Of their eleven children,
three were deaf. chart on p.25

Deafness in the Wald of Kent

Groce traces the gene pool of the Vineyard to the Weald of Kent, an area
investigated in the 1970s by [Boyce, Kuchemann and Harrison 1976].  

In the seventeenth-century village studied by Boyce, Kuchemann,
and Harrison, a third of those who married chose partners from outside
of the village, but almost all the outsiders lived within a six- to eightmile
radius and probably came from the same village as the partner's
mother, grandmother, or some other relative.  p.29

According to this pattern, the seventeenth-century English countryside
can be seen as a series of semirestricted gene pools. The genetic
nature of the population would change gradually as one traveled from
north to south or from east to west. The people of each village would
be in some way genetically unique yet more similar to people in nearby
villages than to those at the other end of the county or in another part
of England. Geographically or culturally isolated areas would be more
genetically distinct than areas where travel was easy. This situation
can be thought of as a genetic continuum rather than as a series of
distinct gene pools. But in an isolated regional cluster of hamlets or
parishes whose residents intermarried, an altered gene could, over the
course of several generations or several centuries, spread widely through
the immediate neighborhood. The genetic anomaly would not tend to
disappear unless endogamous patterns of marriage and mating changed.
Such was the case in the Weald. 

[Groce is unable to trace definitive evidence of deafness in the villages
of the Weald, but mentions an anecdote of signing mentioned in Pepys, by a
hearing person, George Downing (after whom the street) - who had grown up
in the Weald.  p.30] 

Vineyard Sign Language in the Nineteenth Century

When deaf Island children began to attend school in Hartford in the
nineteenth century, the Island sign language seems to have acquired some
aspects of the emerging American Sign Language. It is also possible that the
Vineyard sign language influenced the development of certain aspects of
American Sign Language. It may have been one of the established indigenous
languages that, as Woodward believes, affected the transition from French
Sign Language. Verifying this statement will require a great deal of
additional research, but certain facts are most interesting.

For the first several decades after the founding of the American Asylum (the
same decades in which French Sign Language, introduced to America in 1817,
changed so drastically), the single largest group of deaf children seems to
have been from Martha's Vineyard (American Annals of the Deaf 1852). No other
area sent anywhere near so many children to Hartford, and most of the other
students had grown up in small towns and rural areas, knowing few or no other
deaf children (Clerc 1818).

Also, the second largest group of students over the years (children .who came
from the same area and were in some cases related) was from the Sandy River
area of Maine. These children were descendants of the people who had
emigrated from Martha's Vineyard less than a generation earlier. Their
parents had stayed in contact with the Island in the intervening years, and
it is likely that the sign language used in Maine was similar to that used by
the Vineyarders.

 	

The Vineyard Language, As remembered by my informants, resembled American
Sign Language in many ways. The reason may not be just that the two languages
were creolized, but also that some features of ASL were taken from the
Vineyard language. Schematically, this development would look as shown in the
figure above.

In any case, the original sign language used on the Vineyard does seem to
have acquired many characteristics of the more widely used ASL as increasing
numbers of deaf Island children were sent to the American Asylum in Hartford
after 1850. The resulting creolized sign language was in many ways unique to
Martha's Vineyard. My informants remembered signs for many specific words
that were different from the ASL signs, and Islanders who recalled the
language commonly said that they found it very difficult or impossible to
understand the sign language spoken by deaf off-Islanders or the occasional
translations for the deaf on television.