Imagine that you are deaf. Now let’s pretend you are in the third grade during a history class. You are in the front row because you can read the professor’s lips better that way. You manage to follow most of the explanation, thanks in part to the outline the support teacher has given you. You miss some information that the professor gives, but nothing fundamental. The professor points to a classmate behind you, perhaps because she asked a question? You quickly turn around hoping you can figure out what she is asking, too late: you miss the beginning of the sentence and do not understand what she is saying. You turn to the teacher to at least figure out the answer. Nothing, too late again. The professor, after answering, turns to write a series of dates on the blackboard. You cannot read her lips because her back is turned. What will those dates refer to? You look in the diagrams. Nothing. The classmates get up and start walking around the classroom. Perhaps the bell has rung? You try to make small talk with a classmate but he is eating a sandwich and you have too much trouble reading his lips. After recess is over, the support teacher comes in. He helps you as much as he can, but you struggle even with him: he doesn’t speak Italian Sign Language, your language, the language with which everything would be so much easier for you.
What for us was only a brief play of imagination is the reality of many Italian schools, where deaf students have only partial access to lessons and classroom life. Most deaf students are in the classroom with hearing classmates and teachers who do not know Italian Sign Language (LIS) and have no knowledge regarding deafness. Luckier students are supported by an autonomy and communication assistant who sometimes knows LIS. However, this profession is not recognized by the state, and sometimes the professionals selected have little or no skills, and even when they are competent, they are often underpaid, bounced from one school to another with no obligation of continuity, and present at school for only a few hours a week.
La Lingua Italiana dei Segni (LIS)
There are many people who believe that there is only one sign language, which is universal and shared by all deaf people in the world, and that this was invented, created by who knows who. In fact, it is important to point out that there are many sign languages in the world and that they are all different from each other. In Italy, for example, we use Italian sign language (LIS), which is different from German sign language (DGS) or Kenyan sign language (KSL). This is because sign languages were not created, but developed naturally just as it happened with vocal languages, some scholars even think that sign languages were born before vocal languages.
La comunicazione visivo-gestuale nell’antichità
The first written evidence regarding visual-gestural communication between deaf people, however, is found in Plato’s Cratylus. In this dialogue Socrates discusses with Hermogenes the hypothetical scenario of not possessing a voice and proposes as an alternative the use of what he calls the “gestures of the dumb” describing them as a natural expression based on imitating reality through the hands and body. We cannot know for sure whether this communicative method reported by Plato is an ancestor of today’s sign languages, but it is interesting to note that the philosopher himself describes this communicative method as natural and conveyed through hands and body, just like today’s sign languages. In the next historical period, a real discrimination of deaf people begins to arise, who are deprived of rights in Roman law and whose communicative method, in the Middle Ages, is considered as pantomime and condemned by the religious milieu as a form of animalistic expression linked to earthly and uncontrolled passions. But it is thanks to some religious realities that visual-gestural communication developed and was transmitted. Indeed, in the communities of Cistercian monks, observers of the rule of silence, monastic signs are used, useful for communicating within religious buildings without uttering a word. It is not possible, once again, to find a correlation between the signs used at the time in the religious sphere and those of sign languages despite the fact that some linguists believe that there are some similarities between the signs used by monks and those of some current sign languages.
Le riflessioni sul linguaggio gestuale
The birth of the manual method in the eighteenth century is due to some reflections conducted in the previous two centuries: the first reported by the philosopher Descartes in Discours de la Méthode. Composed in the first half of the 1500s. The author emphasizes how language is a proper and inescapable characteristic of man, such that even individuals who are “deaf and dumb,” as defined by the philosopher, independently develop certain signs that then become their means of communication. A second philosopher, Francis Bacon also refers to visual-gestural communication by pointing out how not only are deaf people seen communicating through signs, but how they also establish conversations with hearing people who have learned this method of communication. Finally, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, Diderot compares sign languages to vocal languages, emphasizing how they also have a direct relationship with human thought, which turns out to be different from that of oral languages, but comparable to it.
La sintesi delle lingue dei segni
Deaf people and sign languages have been, especially in ancient times, deprived of their rights and status, considered inferior and discriminated against. The first to bring the attention of the scientific community to the actual value of sign languages is, in 1960, William Stokoe with his work Sign Language structure. For the first time, the structure of sign languages is fully equated with that of oral languages. In the wake of the research conducted on American Sign Language (ASL), sign languages began to arouse more and more interest in the linguistic and research community. In Italy, it was not until the end of the last century that linguistic research on LIS and sign languages began to flourish. Even in such research the authors note how sign languages and oral languages are similar and differ not in complexity or semantic power, but simply in the use of different channels such as visual-gestural for the former and acoustic-vocal for the latter. LIS is thus also defined linguistically as a real language, having the same complexity and richness as vocal languages. Importantly, LIS, like other sign languages, also has its own grammar, different from that of Italian, and is a real language with its own phonology, syntax and history, independent from that of oral Italian.
Il riconoscimento della LIS
Although linguistic research agrees in affirming the value of sign languages as equal to that of oral languages, a great many states do not recognize their sign languages as such, effectively taking away rights and accessibility from deaf people and thus contributing to the stigma that sees sign languages as second-class languages. The Italian Parliament finally recognized LIS on May 19, 2021, by approving Article 34-ter of the Support Decree by which “the Republic recognizes, promotes and protects the Italian Sign Language (LIS) and the Italian Tactile Sign Language (LIST),” also recognizing the professional figure of LIS interpreters and LIST interpreters. Last among European states, Italy, too, has thus recognized the status of LIS as a language, thus making possible a series of linguistic and other rights for deaf people. From May 19, 2021 to the present, however, unfortunately no progress has been made at the state level. Public places such as schools, municipalities, and hospitals still remain inaccessible to deaf people, and the recognition of Italian sign language still remains, although valuable, a writing on a piece of paper.
LIS a Scuola: Un Approccio Educativo Progressivo
It is interesting how the history of European sign languages and American sign language are closely related to the history of education for deaf people. It is, in fact, in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries that the first educational methods for deaf people were developed. However, the main goal of educators is to teach deaf people oral languages, so that they are able to communicate with hearing people using the majority language. In these centuries, a real market of educational methods was initiated, which can be divided into two broad categories: the manual method, which developed later and is based on the use of some signs or a sign language, and the oralist method, in which the use of hands is forbidden and the focus is on vocal articulatory reeducation.
Il metodo manuale vs il metodo oralista
Around the 1700s a period of development of dedicated education for deaf people began, but access to education was the preserve only of wealthy families who could afford to hire a private educator to instruct their deaf children. In 1760 it was the abbot de l’Epée, thanks to state funding, who started a full-fledged school, the Institut National des sourds-muets, where deaf French children and youth could learn the oral language. De l’Epée, while being the main proponent and disseminator of the manual method, does not, however, recognize the true value of sign languages, but conceives of them only as a function of oral language learning. In the following decades, institutes for the deaf where the manual method is used are spreading both in France and throughout Europe. These institutes contribute to the spread and development of sign languages. The exponential growth in the use of the manual method and the development of sign languages as real languages and no longer as mere reeducation tools for deaf children frightened, beginning in the early nineteenth century, the community of educators, especially those who remained faithful to the oralist method. For this reason, in 1880 the Milan Congress is organized, behind the promotion by three Italian educators, which will have a major impact on the use and development of sign languages in the centuries to come. With the congress, a ban on the use of sign languages both during and outside of classes is decreed in all institutions for the deaf in Europe. This starts a period of repression of these languages, which are strongly ostracized, thus pushing deaf people to shame and hide their language. This period officially ends 130 years later with the Vancouver Congress of 2010, in which all the resolutions passed at the previous Congress in Milan are rejected and the educator community officially apologizes to the deaf community.
Il potenziale delle lingue dei segni nel panorama scolastico odierno
Since 2010, sign languages have slowly re-entered the educational paths of deaf people, who in recent years have had access to more inclusive and attentive teaching to their needs. The introduction of sign languages in schools would give deaf students the opportunity to have full access to education on par with their hearing peers. The difficulties deaf people face in accessing education are in fact purely linguistic: there is no LIS interpreter in Italian schools, but students are supported by support teachers or communication assistants who are often not specialized and unable to convey information in LIS. Following the approval of Article 34-ter of the Supports Decree, some regions began to invest in training in Italian sign language and tactile Italian sign language. In 2021, the Veneto Region and Sicily Region approved the 2021-2023 Three-Year Plan of “Interventions for Social Inclusion, Removal of Barriers to Communication, and Recognition and Promotion of Italian Sign Language and Italian Tactile Sign Language,” funding teacher training courses and LIS/LISt workshops in each province of the two regions in classrooms with deaf pupils. The projects in the two regions were enthusiastically received both by the teachers, who enrolled in the training courses in massive numbers, and by the students who were able, many of them for the first time, to access a language that would enable them to communicate with their deaf classmates. Veneto and Puglia have reintroduced the project in 2023, adding the possibility for teachers and students who already participated in the 2021-2023 three-year plan to participate in intermediate level courses in order to improve their skills in LIS/LISt. These two regions represent a beacon of hope in the Italian landscape. Deaf students in two regions can finally use their language to communicate with the class and teachers and see their own language and culture taught in their classroom, as a real language, with its own history and value. The hope for the future is that there will be more and more efforts to organize projects similar to those proposed by Veneto and Puglia, so that deaf students can have fewer and fewer barriers and the school will be more accessible.
Italian sign language, like many other sign languages around the world, has had a history of discrimination and repression. Even today, most deaf people are still excluded from public life: most schools, hospitals and other public places still remain inaccessible. The state does not guarantee LIS interpreters and although it has formally committed to recognize, promote and protect LIS, nothing has been done at the state level from May 19, 2021 to the present. For Italy to truly become a democratic country accessible to all, inclusion must start with the government, and not be tied to initiatives of individuals or territorial or regional realities that, while extremely valuable, remain limited in time and space.
by Nicola Noro
The article Inclusion in public life also passes through Sign Language comes from TheNewyorker.
