Creating a sign language out of everything and everywhere: An example from the deaf people of Bissau
Temas
Detalles
An autochthonous sign language, designated locally as Língua Gestual Guineense, or LGG, has been emerging in the city of Bissau – and elsewhere in the country – at the hands of a growing deaf community. First, in the capital, the number of deaf people has increased since 2003 in school settings and, from then on, also slowly in other regions of Guinea-Bissau. The present thesis captures such a phenomenon by giving a two-pronged record of the deaf people in Guinea-Bissau and their language. On one side, I draw a detailed historical account of the rise of the deaf community and the circumstances leading to the emergence of their sign language. On the other side, I conduct linguistic analyses to understand where LGG signs come from and how the lexical system builds up in the first years of language emergence. I portray here the rise of a deaf community with an uncommon profile. It is set up in a free-signing environment with no hearing aids or speech-oriented educational ideologies. Even though deaf people primarily meet in a school setting, they have established a well-organised gathering system outside the school walls. In this context, it stands out how much they seek to make their hearing peers aware of their presence as deaf people and their sign language. Moreover, with a deeprooted sense of pride, deaf people seem to engage in everyday activities alongside their hearing peers.