Society and community

Hanna Morvay: Thank you. I want to talk this evening about a language that, as far as we know, was never written down, never taught in a school, and was used for about a hundred and fifty years by a few hundred people in a single mountain valley. I'll call the valley Almedo, which isn't its real name; the families there asked me not to use it. Hanna Morvay: Until the nineteen-sixties, Almedo could be reached only by a mule track, and for genetic reasons that still aren't fully understood, deafness ran in several of its families. At one point roughly one person in thirty was born deaf, many times the usual rate. When I first went there, I assumed I would be studying a deaf minority with its own language, living alongside a hearing majority. That turned out to be the wrong way of looking at it. The striking thing about Almedo was that almost everyone signed, hearing people included. A hearing farmer would sign to his deaf neighbour across a field, but he'd also sign to his hearing brother, simply because it worked better than shouting over the wind. Hanna Morvay: So how do you study a language whose last fluent users are in their eighties? My first plan was to film older people telling stories at home, which is the standard method, and it was surprisingly unproductive. They were self-conscious in front of the camera and kept slipping into the national sign language they'd learnt later in life. What worked far better was the market. Every Thursday the older men still gather at the livestock sales, and when you're bargaining over the price of a calf, nobody has time to be self-conscious. Most of my recordings of the old valley signing come from those Thursday mornings. Hanna Morvay: One of the first things I noticed was how signs for people worked. In many sign languages, a person's name sign describes something about them: a beard, say, or a particular way of walking. In Almedo, name signs almost always referred to the house a person came from, so that your identity was tied to the family land rather than to your face. If you married into another farm, your sign changed. Hanna Morvay: So what happened to the language? The obvious answer is the road, which arrived in 1964, and the road certainly brought television, visitors and work in the towns. But signing held up remarkably well for another decade after that. The real turning point, I'd argue, came in the early seventies, with a decision taken far away and with the best of intentions: the regional authorities began sending deaf children to a residential school in the city from the age of six. There they learnt the national sign language, in many ways a far richer resource, and when they came home for the summer, they found the valley signing old-fashioned. Their hearing brothers and sisters, meanwhile, no longer needed to sign to them at all. Hanna Morvay: I'm often asked whether I think all this was a tragedy, and people expect me to say yes. What strikes me more is what Almedo shows about disability itself. In that valley, being deaf was not especially remarkable, because the whole community had made the adjustment. Deaf people farmed, served on the valley council and married whomever they chose. Their deafness didn't change when the valley changed. What changed was whether the people around them shared their language, and that, I think, is what we should really be paying attention to.