ASL Literature
Byrne
number of unwritten languages. Ong (1982, 2009) believes that, out of approximately 3,000
spoken languages in the world today, about 2,922 languages are oral. Another source indicates
that, out of 5,000 or more languages, roughly 500 have a written tradition (Kenrick, 2000).
Examples of spoken languages that have no written form are Abom (a language of Papua, New
Guinea), Alabama (a Native American language of the United States), Assiniboine (an Aboriginal
language of Canada), and Reli (a language of India) (University of Cambridge Museum of
Archaeology and Anthropology, 2015, n.p.). These languages have a rich literature of their own.
During the time when awareness that ASL is a bona fide human language was still
emerging, colleges and universities around the country struggled over whether ASL could be
taught as a foreign language for credit on a par with French or Spanish, for example. The lack of
written literature for the signed language was viewed as a serious obstacle and was used as an
argument against the offering of ASL coursework. Nancy Frishberg (1988) who is hearing and
knows ASL felt obligated to write a scholarly article to respond to such resistance. She wrote that
“the case can be made by analogy with the greatest traditions in Western and non-Western
literature that written forms of language are not required for a community to possess a well-formed
aesthetic in poetry, narrative, humor, and rhetoric” (p. 150). The classical Greek Odyssey was used
as an example for how it was delivered orally long before it was written down. The important point
that Frishberg made lies in how the Odyssey was originally created in the oral form. This suggests
that literature being limited to the written form is too narrow.
While the situation for ASL literature has now improved, there is one important
observation to consider. Gallaudet University professor, Lois Bragg (1993), who is deaf, pointed
out that “ASL…is an ‘oral’ language – perhaps the only true living ‘oral’ literature in the western
world” (p. 416). It appears that a new dimension to the foreign language learning experience has
taken place with students studying ASL. They are not only learning a new language, but that it is
part of an oral culture that deaf people have cultivated and maintained right here in the United
States and Canada.
ASL has its share of misunderstandings as a human language, including how it was once
thought to be lacking linguistic properties and is rather made up of rudimentary gestures or is even
a code of English. Language has been narrowly defined as spoken, not signed (Meier, 2002). Deaf
people suffered the consequences of social stigma against their language. Signed language was
widely forbidden from use in American and Canadian schools for the deaf during the latter part of
the nineteenth century and for most of the twentieth century (see Van Cleve & Crouch, 1989 for
the historical review of deaf education). Spoken language bias is a serious matter and only recently
has it become a subject of scholarly scrutiny. It is hoped that this attention will lead to a long
deserved provision of quality education for deaf students (Cripps & S. Supalla, 2012).
Should there be bias associated with literature, it would be about literature having to be
written. The dominant nature of written culture in the western world at present is a serious matter.
Any person who does not know how to read and write is widely viewed as problematic. Bahan
(1992) wrote on behalf of the deaf community and ASL as follows:
The issue of whether literature needs to be written in order to be literature is a
question of power, not merit. Literature can indeed be either oral or written. What
we need to do is find a way to explicate and demonstrate the literary value of our
oral tales. In order to do that, Bahan and [S.] Supalla . . . in their ASL Literature
Series . . . have analyzed their narratives, Bird of a Different Feather and For a
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