American Sign Language (ASL), used by Deaf actor Marlee Matlin, is a foreign language here. New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL) is related to British, Australian and South African Sign Language. (Deaf Canadians use ASL; Belgium, with two spoken languages, has only one sign language; and Ireland has two sign languages, Protestant and Catholic.)
Marianne Ahlgren proved in her 1985 PhD thesis at Victoria University that NZSL is a fully-fledged language with a large vocabulary of signs — not just 50, as the myth has it. It is not just mime or gesture, and the meanings of most signs are not obvious. Sign order is different from English word-order; the “grammar” is conveyed by the placement or movement of the signs.
Education of the deaf took a great leap backward in 1880 when a council in Milan of teachers of the Deaf (from which the Deaf themselves were excluded) ruled that teaching should be oral only, and sign language had no place. For the next 100 years, education of the Deaf focused on speech to the exclusion of almost everything else, including literacy. The result has been low-paid jobs, or none, for the Deaf.
The “hearing impaired” sign (meaning Teletext captions) prefixes an increasing number of programmes, and this is a great leap forward for some Deaf people, but it just means frustration for the many who can’t afford Teletext or have trouble reading the captions. And Reasonable Doubts is not captioned.
Two years ago the only programme in NZSL, News Review, was scrapped after a survey of Deaf people seemed to show they preferred captions. In fact, the questions were so confusing and the analysis so loaded that all it really showed was that they badly want anything on television they can possibly use.
That New Zealand’s own visual language has a place on the visual medium ought to be obvious (other linguistic groups can use radios). Even Reasonable Doubts is better than nothing. My Deaf friends give it the thumbs up.
But the failure of television in New Zealand to provide anything in NZSL is described as “a running sore” by Hilary McCormack, vice-president of the New Zealand Association of the Deaf.
She says they are grateful for the captions, but that is only half of TV’s responsibility. “It ignores the other half, the people who use NZSL and can’t read the captions. They have no other option for acquiring information.”
So far their pleas have fallen on — well, not deaf ears, obviously.
New Zealand On Air’s Programme Manager Emily Loughnan says any signing would have to be at the expense of captions, and she’s had high praise for the increase in captioning. NZOA has to consider the needs of other minorities more numerous than the Deaf, such as Samoans.
Broadcasters “won’t even begin” to consider putting a signer in a box in the corner, even during talking sequences, because they’d lose audience-share and hence advertising. So any signed programmes would have to go at off-peak times that are just as inconvenient for the Deaf as everyone else.
* The Deaf community uses a capital “D” for Deaf to distinguish the cultural aspects of being Deaf from the medical condition of being unable to hear.
