Irish sign language should be recognised, taught and a right

Imagine your child is at a school where neither the teacher nor anyone else in the school can communicate in his/her own first language. Imagine that all the children in the school share the same first language, but none of the adults who work there do. Imagine that your child will never be encouraged to communicate in its own language for the entire time it is at the school. Stretch your mind and envisage an educational space where those same children are taught NOT to express themselves in their first language, even though it is the most accessible means of communicating, both within their own community and elsewhere.

Can you get your head round that? Me neither. But that's what happens for deaf children in Ireland because Irish Sign Language (ISL) is denied recognition as an official language. This is worse than kicking the crutch out from under someone with a limp. ISL is not a crutch or a prop, but the cultural and essential expression of a defined community. The right to use one's own language is a fundamental human right, and deaf people are entitled to the same linguistic rights that hearing people enjoy.

Deaf ISL users differ in one important respect from any other linguistic community, in that deaf people do not have access to spoken languages like English or Irish. Nevertheless, the parents of deaf children still have to fight with deaf school authorities and the Department of Education to get even minimal provision for ISL teaching.

There is no prerequisite for a teacher in a deaf school to be fluent in ISL. Indeed there is no prerequisite that they should have any ISL at all. Can you imagine sending your kid to an English-speaking school where none of the staff are fluent in English? And where, should it occur that some part of the curriculum is delivered in English, it is a pleasant surprise rather than an established practice?

Instead, the ethos of deaf schools is "oralism" – an approach that views deafness as solely a clinical/pathological condition. Hence the emphasis is on speech and language classes, the focus on hearing aids and the use of lip-reading. Lip-reading is mainly guesswork, as pointed out on the Irish Deaf Society's website: "a good lip-reader can read only four out of 10 words on someone's lips – the rest is deduced by context. As it is necessary to have a high level of English to lip-read well, it is often the case that hearing people are better lip-readers than deaf people."

A high level of English among deaf children is highly unlikely, because if they do not receive even basic education through the medium of ISL, then their chances of understanding anything they are taught is severely compromised. Their access to a full curriculum and their potential go unrealised. No wonder parents of deaf children are extremely worried about their children's futures.

For all children, the first real sense of community beyond family comes from school. The freedom to express oneself and to be understood; to learn; to be filled with wonder and to have information; to exchange stories; to grow confident; to develop friendships; share ideas; to feel safe; to be amongst one's peers – these are all taken for granted in a hearing society. Among deaf people, "community" is between those who identify with each other through a shared perception of the world, experienced and expressed through visual and kinaesthetic input – the sense of knowing the world through muscle sense and bodily movements. Contrary to myth, sign language is a proper language with vocabulary, syntax and grammar, and is processed in the same part of the brain as spoken languages.

For deaf people in Ireland, recognition of ISL is a linguistic lifeline to mainstream participation in society. Official recognition paves the way to improved access to services, education, employment and information for deaf people. In the words of the British Deaf Association, "when we change people's attitudes towards the language of deaf people, we change people's attitude towards deaf people themselves: in acknowledging the rightful status of the communication of deaf people, we are achieving a recognition of the rights and dignity of the whole deaf community."

In Finland and Portugal, there are constitutional commitments to sign language, also in Ecuador, Venezuela, Uganda and Uruguay. Sweden and Denmark provide bilingual education for deaf children and offer Swedish sign language as a "foreign" language in mainstream schools. More recently, the British government has officially recognised British Sign Language (BSL) as a minority language and is considering legislation to put it on a par with the protection and promotion of Welsh. As BSL and ISL are both spoken in Northern Ireland, the British Secretary of State, Paul Murphy, last year formally recognised not only BSL but also ISL. Ironic that.

?More For information on Irish Sign Language Awareness Week, see www.irishdeafsociety.ie