La llengua de signes catalana, una llengua pròpia més de Catalunya
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Detalles
Sign languages (SLs) used by Deaf communities have been traditionally deprived of the status of full-fledged natural languages till the 2nd half of the 20th century, when the conjunction of linguistic research into them and sociopolitical emancipation of those communities started to slowly change the situation. Their users have constituted minorized linguistic communities within larger hearing societies with one ore more dominant spoken languages and their linguistic identity is usually concealed under the label of disability. Consequently, signers remain mostly invisible to the mainstream society, which poses very specific challenges to the recognition, maintenance and regulation of SLs from the broader perspective of minority language policies. In Mediterranean Europe partial legal recognition of SLs has been granted in the last decades through specific policies related to Deaf education or public media, but no full recognition had been achieved till recently. In this paper, I present and analyze the recent legal initiatives for SLs in Catalonia (2006, 2010) and Spain (2007) (Catalan SL, LSC and Spanish SL, LSE). I argue that they exemplify two significantly different approaches to the reality of minority languages in the visual-gestural modality: the latter bill formulates SL recognition as part of the regulation of the accessibility means for deaf people, both signers and non-signers; the former regulates LSC only as a language instead, leaving deaf accessibility issues for regulation through a different bill.