SASL Newsletter - Spring 2019 Issue Issue 13 - Spring 2019 | Page 11

By Heidi Landecker
Joseph Hill, an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro [now
working at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf in New York], believes he is the only black,
deaf, Ph.D. linguist in America, and maybe in the world. “Just me,” he told an audience of about 40
people on Sunday at the Linguistic Society of America’s annual meeting in Minneapolis. “No
pressure,” he added.
Hill, who is 34, and tall, was giving a talk, “How Black ASL Can Create Opportunities for
Diversity in Sign-Language Research,” as part of a symposium on diversity in linguistics. He was
speaking in American Sign Language.
Before Hill got to the research opportunities, he gave a brief history of how deaf education led
to Black ASL. The first school for the deaf was established in Hartford, Conn., in 1817, by Thomas
Gallaudet, a hearing American whose son would later found Gallaudet University, in Washington, and
a deaf Frenchman named Laurent Clerc.
Hill produced a chart that showed how the schools spread across the country. But the first
school for black deaf children in the South – at least, south of the District of Columbia – didn’t open
until 1867, in North Carolina. Southern schools remained segregated until well after Brown v. Board of
Education, in 1954, and it wasn’t until 1978 that the last Southern state, Louisiana, fully integrated its
schools. So, it is not surprising that deaf African-Americans developed and were taught their own
version of ASL, just as some black Americans speak African-American Vernacular Englsh, sometimes
called Ebonics.
Many hearing people think sign language is universal, but it is not. Hill, who was born deaf,
studied in Italy on a Fulbright and knows Italian Sign Language, as well as ASL and Black ASL.
American Sign Language developed based on the French sign language that Thomas Gallaudet
learned from Clerc, so American and French signers understood one another better than British and
American signers do, for example.
Hill is one of four authors of The Hidden Treasure of Black ASL, a 2011 book that explores the
differences between Black American Sign Language and ASL of whites in America. The differences
are significant enough that black deaf students who went to segregated schools couldn’t understand
white teachers and classmates when the schools integrated. The researchers created a filmed corpus
of conversational vernacular Black ASL as it is used in the South, and the book examines some of
those differences, which include disparate gestures for some words, such as “deer” and “have,” and
whether words are signed with one hand or two.
But Hill, who is a member of the specialized-education-services department at the Greensboro
campus and directs its ASL teacher-licensing program, says there are many more research
opportunities, including chronicling changes in Black ASL as its signers have more contact with white
signers, and with spoken African-American Vernacular English. He told us about the Black ASL
Project, which seeks the recollections of people who went to black schools for the deaf. Much more is
to be learned about the schools themselves. And his own research has only begun to look at lexical
variations between ASL and Black ASL – the different signs for the same word – and at what linguists
call “prosody” in sign, the use of facial expressions, eye and head movement, and other physical
behaviors.
(Continue on the next page)
The Power of ASL
11
Spring 2019 – Issue 13