Sign Language Oralism

Although sign language was nearly lost by the year 1913 due to the dominance of oralism in the educational system of the deaf in America, many deaf people still communicated with each other using sign language regardless of their own personal risk and other environmental pressures. Also sometime later, many advances developed especially in the technological fields, which enabled the deaf to express themselves in completely different, new ways and helped them share their ideas and concerns with the world more easily. These eventually helped turn the tide of oralism and bring back sign language. One such advancement that helped sign language grow was the new invention of motion pictures which developed around the late nineteenth century. …show more content…
Together, he and two of his deaf colleagues began doing some of their own research analysis of languages, particularly in the properties of sign language. Using that same method of analysis, Stokoe and his companions noticed that ASL passed all the linguistic requirements such as phonology, morphology, and syntax and showed all properties of language including grammar, spelling, and other things just like all other languages only that sign language communicated these things visually with the hands, handshapes, movement, hand position, facial expression, and other things instead of with words. It also could communicate abstract and complex thoughts and ideas just like spoken language. Sign language truly was and is a distinct language of its own, and they could finally prove it. With the civil rights movement occurring around this time in America, enabling the idea to be more easily acknowledged and accepted then it could have been before, with the growing interest in the new possibilities of sign language, and prompted by the amazing discovery, William decided to publish an unprecedented version of a sign language dictionary. In this dictionary, signs were not translated directly into English as they had been before, but instead they were analyzed and defined by internal structure. This became the first true dictionary of sign language. With all these occurances, sign language was now an official language completely separate from English. At first, however, the deaf community was strongly against this dictionary. They were not sure of the actual intentions of the hearing people and how they could even try to describe a language that they had never completely understood or accepted until now. How could they go from thinking of it as nothing relevant at all, and even