Lending a hand: Competence through cooperation in Nepal's Deaf associations

Abstract

Since forming contacts with international Deaf associations promoting an ethnolinguistic model of Deafness, members of Nepal's Deaf associations define Deafness by competence in Nepali Sign Language rather than audiological status. By analyzing the ideological and interactional processes through which homesigners are incorporated into Nepali Deaf social life, this article explores the effects of local beliefs about the nature of language, personhood, and competence on this model of Deafness. Due to former linguistic isolation, many homesigners are constrained in their ability to acquire Nepali Sign Language and, in social contexts where ideological conceptions of language use highlight individual competencies, would not be included in a Deaf social category. However, Nepali conceptions of socially distributed personhood contribute to a focus on the dialogically emergent dimensions of semiosis. As a result, recognition as a competent signer in this context can depend less on individual cognitive ability than on social collaboration. (d/Deaf, sign language, competence, language ideologies)*

Technically Speaking: On Equipping and Evaluating “Unnatural” Language Learners

“…The problem is not simply Koko's apparent gorillaness but the conspicuous coconstruction of her utterances. As indicated already, similar complications arise with the attribution of speaker roles in impaired human speech (Goodwin 2004; Hoffman‐Dilloway 2011), where “incompetent” speakers are aided by, or are seen to be mirroring, the linguistic competence of another. Whether or not a fair assessment can be made of Koko's prowess, the very orchestration of an animal's linguistic performance, its continual documentation and narration as a wonder, serves to communicate powerful messages about the naturalness of human communication by comparison.…”

“…However, people with different language impairments may experience a similar social withdrawal, they may also be exposed to resources for language development that they cannot access or are not tailored to their needs (see Hoffman‐Dilloway 2011; Ochs et al 2005). One of the reasons that PECS is preferred as a method is that it does not require eye contact between the participants, only that the learner attends to the object being exchanged.…”

“…If evaluated relative to the achievement of “real” speech, this range of communicative forms can appear quite limited, which can create the kinds of anxiety and uncertainty documented in the morning school meeting mentioned at the beginning of this article. For medically deaf Nepali home signers discussed by Hoffman‐Dilloway (2011), competence is recognized even when they mimic or copy the signs of their interlocutors, quite against the standards of mainstream linguistics. For people on the autism spectrum subjected to the modern semiotic ideology of the naturally speaking subject, by contrast, competence is thought to require linguistic performance apart from the influence of other people's linguistic agency, stemming as it does from a communicative interior.…”

Ordering burgers, reordering relations

“…Therefore, as illustrated in figure 2 by Deaf Nepali artist Pratigya Shakya, parents often discourage d/Deaf children from displaying their condition through engaging in more than minimal gesturing or signing in public. 7 This practice can compound the effects of d/Deaf children's linguistic and social isolation, with lasting social, linguistic and cognitive effects (Taylor 1997;Hoffmann 2008;Hoffmann-Dilloway 2011a). Within many typologies of gesture, the soldier and a d/Deaf child who used a shaking hand to indicate "NO" would be taken as performing two instances of the same widely socially circulated and conventionalized emblem.…”

“…In this article I follow the common Deaf Studies convention of writing the English word "deaf" in lowercase to indicate the inability to hear, "Deaf", written with a capital D, to indicate identification as a member of a signing community, and using the mixed case, d/Deaf, to refer to groups or situations in which both medical and cultural framings of d/Deafness are relevant. As I have discussed in other work(Hoffmann-Dilloway 2011a), my use of this convention should not be taken to imply that I view this distinction as universally relevant, or relevant in the same ways across social contexts.DOI: 10.1075/prag.21.3.04hor …”