Zachariahの記ar事ticle

Recently so much of my media intake is touching on a frustrating misunderstanding, and the question is having a moment especially via tiktok and other video-based social media platforms that have been able to elevate signed and spoken languages that had not been so elevated by the text-based internet. Unfortunately a lot of people are propagating ideas I don’t think are reasonable, though I will admit I struggled sourcing data for either of our claims.

The question at hand is effectively, and without pun, from whom can we learn ASL?

The Native Speaker Fallacy

Why do we elevate native speakers over fluent or even just competent speakers? A sense of a soul. A sense of an intimate identity the likes of which can only be formed in the forge of childhood, one which ceases operation by the time people are willfully studying things such as language. In Tawada’s Scattered all over the Earth, I find my arguments and so I won’t bother rewording it:

Some people assume that the language of a Native Speaker is perfectly fused with her soul… There are people who think everything native speakers say must be grammatically correct, when all they’re doing is faithfully copying the way most of the people around them talk… Still others say a native has a better vocabulary. But most native speakers are too busy to think much about language, and tend to use the same words and phrases all the time, whereas non-natives, who move back and forth between two languages, are always looking for new words and expressions

We romanticize the native language. It happens across many domains. But ultimately it deserves no more romanticization than anything else about our upbringings over which we have no control. As an example, who attributes any similar degree of meaning to the birth characteristics of race and ethnicity?

The issue goes further than just personal connection to the language and how that is conflated with expertise into ownership of the language. An authentic Spanish speaker. Contrasted, of course, with someone who learned it out of love for the language, the literature, etc; and of course we reject immigrants and professionals outright because they only learned it for the moolah.

The “Native Speaker Fallacy” is actually an idea coined some three decades ago by linguists. Some have even gone so far as to argue that native speakers don’t really exist, but that note is more for color than argument.

Let’s assume Native Speakers make the best teachers

There are many arguments based in linguistic theory and classroom observation, and of course good old fashioned anecdotes, made for why native speakers make the best teachers, but competency is almost never among them. I’ll put forth my own: oh shoot I’ve got none. I 100% preferred my French, Russian and Spanish teachers who didn’t speak natively to those who did, because the former had gone through the process and knew what was going to trip me up. As I reached higher levels of competency I wanted more access to native speakers because my questions became of a very niche, often sociolinguistic nature. Generally, the strongest arguments made for NSTs are sociolinguistic in nature, but if a good bonefeel for colloquialisms and idioms are the primary issue here, a teacher is not generally necessary for that: cultural immersion will suffice, because the primary need is for more input, not deeper analysis.

But, assuming they are the best, let’s get back to the issue of ASL. How many native users of ASL are there? Tough question because different people will regard different users' life stories as disqualifying them from nativity! There’s a common descriptor in the literature of “oral” signers, which by some reports make up the majority of ASL users. These are deaf/HH people raised in hearing homes without strong familial support for signed language learning endeavors, and those who went deaf later in life. Thus they were raised “orally” and have a relative status in the deaf community. Netflix’s show Deaf U touches on conflicts at Gallaudet between signers of different pedigrees.

There is no ASL or English or any other linguistic monolith

Let’s focus on those speakers who have been signing from birth: raised in a signing home with good access to ASL education resources. These are few and far between. And it doesn’t change the fact that they will still exhibit regionalism. It doesn’t change the fact that there are a number of ASL dialects in this country and around the world (on top of ASL being just one of many signed languages)! And the shoddy standards by which Deaf children are supported in many education systems only encourages this lexical fragmentation. Put this way: if someone asks you about the location of the bubbler, what are they trying to accomplish? Well, if you’re in Milwaukee or Rhode Island, they’re looking for a water fountain. But anywhere else in the country, they’re trying to get you to pass the bong. Oh, sorry, did I say water fountain? In half the country I mean drinking fountain. Oh golly, what do my non-US readers call that public water dispensing device? Why can’t we agree on one word for one thing?!

If you’re a user of Anki, and you’ve ever tried to download a community hosted deck, especially in ASL, you have probably found that most of the decks have at least one downvote under the pretense of the cards being wrong (wrong word, wrong sign), though some will do justice in their review by noting more fully that it is wrong for Mexican Spanish or Castilian Spanish or wrong for the community of signers they practice with. Linguistic standardization at the teaching, learning, or even utilization levels is a challenge, and it necessary for identifying what is a native speaker, because such a speaker must engage with the standard language fluently.

Effectively, when we drill down into what it means to be a native speaker, especially in a language with so few resources for it such as ASL, we start having to make decisions about whose language we invalidate. Which ASL users are not actually ASL users? Who is speaking real French and who is Canadian? And then we get royal academies and such, enforcing a prestigious form of the language, guarding against the incursion of all unapproved words. My aversion to prescriptivism, which inherently devalues linguistic creativity, is another reason why this video provoked me to write this essay.

Ignore the pompous rhetoric: the video was upsetting because…

Because they understood! The word was “wrong” but it was close enough and, most importantly, the context revealed its meaning. There may have been a bump, a brief moment of deciphering, but the point is communication happened and that is the only function of language. Everything else is ornament. It’s no better when people correct others' spelling in informal settings where confusion is unlikely if not impossible; when people demand a pre-conjunctive terminal serial comma for formal rather than real functional reasons; when pedants jeeringly ask “did you literally explode or figuratively?” There are only a handful of situations where it is reasonable to suggest corrections to other people’s language usage, and a commercial transaction is generally not it: there are people waiting in line. This person’s profession is not ASL interpreting, it is coffee slinging.

On top of that, and this could just be because I am overly sensitive, her invocation of deaf people as guardians of the language, on top of being nearly indefensible, erased HH people as valid signers and discredited interpreters, who are already under attack thanks to some high profile incidents. I’m sure this wasn’t her intention, but this is the problem with public communication: Someone is going to come at me about something I hand waved about or simplified for the purpose of expediency, assuming I would be understood well enough. Her video could have been just teaching the sign for vanilla (“I recently interacted with someone who was struggling with this sign, so here it is…") but it was about who ASL belonged to.

Does it all really matter?

Unfortunately yes. Despite this cultural moment, ASL is a dying language. Advancing technology and dwindling education budgets are threatening to kill it and gatekeeping how ASL is used only discourages more people from using it. ASL is useful beyond just communicating with Deaf/HH communities. Consider:

While constrained use contexts such as this often result in pidgins, it has to be noted that pidgins are not a bad thing. Pidgins are in fact the primary field of study for some of the most well known linguists today. They are one way by which the world is given new languages, and one of the means by which people may conduct their lives organically, without the stricture of a real language’s traditions.

My wild conclusion

The problem here is actually with regard to the concepts of language “learning” and “teaching.” Better formalizations are “building” and “sharing.” When we start thinking of even mere conversations, which may start with a lot of shared context via the shared knowledge of a certain region’s sonic communicative preferences, it becomes obvious that communication is a consensus building activity. At the risk of misattributing a Lockean idea to Voltaire:

Définissez les termes, vous dis-je, ou jamais nous ne nous entendrons.

“Learning” a language gives us a major leg up; allows us to work from a set of commonly accepted symbol-idea mappings when conversing, but it does not guarantee comprehension, and we should keep this in mind when considering the acquisition of contexts like ASL and German. When we talk to others, we share our conceptions with them to build common understanding. All the hand-wringing about proper grammar or correct words is just anxiety over this complex social act, and that kind of fear tends to drive us down negative paths intellectually and spiritually.