A short history of the Deaf Community.
The UK deaf community is an astonishingly diverse mosaic.
For over 200 years, the mosaic has evolved out of a vast spectrum of socio-economic class, ethnicity, religion and culture.
As I push open the swing doors to one London’s ‘deaf pub’ gatherings, I’m as likely to be pulled into sign language gossip by a friend of Lithuanian or Sri Lankan descent as I am by a cockney or a Scot. Joining the next circle of deafies, I might sign to a chief executive or bricklayer, doctor or office cleaner.
At times, it seems as if deaf people mingle with each other across demographic boundaries more freely than hearing people do. Why so?
The answer is not hard to find: whether their deafness is genetic or otherwise, deaf babies – and children who become deaf – appear randomly in families across all ethnic and socio-economic groups.
And, nine out of ten deaf people grow up in hearing families with no experience of deafness, often with limited or no sign language abilities. So, the deaf community fills a gap in our lives.
Enter any deaf gathering and you’ll instantly feel the ‘electricity’ in the room as deafies throw off the limitations of listening and lipreading and sign freely - about anything from climate change to last night’s football results.
The result: a community vibrant enough to bring together people who’d otherwise be unlikely to gather under one roof.
In recent decades, our 70,000-strong UK deaf community has been enriched by migrants from the Commonwealth and European Union (EU) nations. War and famine have also bought deaf refugees to our shores.
It is this incredible diversity which Deaf Mosaic celebrates.
And yet in the 21st century, as social and technological change accelerates faster than ever, fresh questions arise. Will the deaf community survive or disappear?
Before we speculate about the future, let’s revisit the past.
The origins of sign language
If we go back into the mists of time, references to ‘deaf’ or ‘mute’ people in Roman, Anglo-Saxon and Norman literature are rare.
Most Britons spent their whole lives in small farming communities. So deaf people were geographically isolated from each other and without a common sign language. We can only speculate about their lives. We may assume they improvised ‘home signs’ with their families and neighbours; for basic needs like food, shelter, work tasks.
Home signs don’t pass from one generation to the next and aren’t shared beyond the user’s immediate circle. As soon as the deaf individual dies, their home signs disappear too.