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Bimodal bilingualism 9 Comments More | Login | Reply /

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  • The mother has perhaps chosen her words poorly. What happens in a huge number of cases where deaf parents have hearing children is that the children get absorbed into hearing society, and leave their parents behind. This, of course, happens with all children and parents, but is markedly different with the deaf vs. hearing communities. Deaf society is smaller, just by nature of having far fewer members. There are lots of things deaf people can do, but there are way more things out there for hearing people to do. When hearing children leave their deaf parents behind, it's much more of an abandonment, or at least is often perceived that way by the parents. So yeah, the children will have this great language to speak to others with, but they will grow into a different society, essentially. They may use the language they've learned with their parents, but they are almost invariably going to drop that culture for the larger hearing culture. This can be a pretty major disappointment for a lot of parents. It'd be like a cat giving birth to a dog. The dog is going to go out in the big world and walk around and do things with other dogs. The cat is going to stay home and do cat things. The cat parent (if cats cared about that sort of thing) is probably going to feel pretty left out. *shrug*. I guess you'd have to have seen it happen a few times to understand the depth of the "problem". It's easy to see it as a non-issue when you don't face things like your child being embarrassed to be seen speaking to you in public, because sign language attracts attention. And I have seen that happen.
    • I see what you mean.

      But I worry that this is only one step away from any other language minority having their children modified so that they can only learn their parents' home language, and not the societal language, lest they become different from their parents.

      • but do parents have children to be different or to be a likeness of themselves? I suspect it's most often the latter. Family is your tribe and language is a major part of belonging both psychologically as well as socially.

      • I saw a story recently where deaf people were criticizing technological and medical advances to help bring hearing to the deaf, because they said there's nothing "wrong" with being deaf, it is who they are, and they shouldn't try to "fix" it. It's quite boggling.

        I think most of this stems simply from an inferiority complex so strong that these people have convinced themselves that their genetic bug is a feature. It's biological Microsoftianism!
        • I have been strongly tempted at times to infer that there is not much of a "culture of debate" among the deaf, because when I read of a deaf person expressing points on these and other issues, they often choose weaker points, instead of points less open to challenge.

          I think the strongest point against cochlear implants is that they turn you from stone deaf, to just mostly deaf -- it's still just not enough acoustic resolution that you could function without ASL.

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