Martha's Vineyards Sign Language
| Martha's Vineyards Sign Language | ||
|---|---|---|
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Spoken in |
United States | |
| speaker | none ( language extinct ) | |
| Linguistic classification |
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| Official status | ||
| Official language in | - | |
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-3 |
mre |
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Martha's Vineyards Sign Language or Martha's Vineyard Sign Language is a sign language that is no longer used and developed on the island of Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts .
The population on Martha's Vineyard had a comparatively high proportion of deaf people in the 18th and 19th centuries , which arose from the genetic characteristics of an immigrant group from the Kentish Weald (German: Wald, wie in Frankenwald, Bavarian Forest) in England . At times, one in 155 people was deaf there, compared to an average of 1 in 1000 in the United States . In the village of Chilmark , every fourth inhabitant was deaf. This led to the widespread use of sign language from around 1700 to the early 20th century. Almost all of the residents of Martha's Vineyard were proficient in this sign language.
The special form of this sign language was originally that of the Weald and developed into its own Martha's Vineyard form in the seclusion of the island. As Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet and the deaf Frenchman Laurent Clerc in 1817 the first school for the deaf in Hartford in the neighboring state of Connecticut founded, was Martha's Vineyard Sign Language, along with the French sign language one of the foundations for the development of today common American Sign Language ( American Sign Language , ASL ).
The last known person to master this sign language died in 1952. When a PhD student at Brown University visited the island in 1970 and wanted to research sign language, she found that even then much of the language was lost because no records existed.
Individual evidence
See also
literature
- Nora Ellen Groce: Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language: Hereditary Deafness on Martha's Vineyard . Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Massachusetts / USA) 1985, ISBN 0-674-27041-X (English).
- German version: Nora Ellen Groce: "Everyone spoke sign language here", translation by Elmar Bott; Hamburg; Signum Verlag, ISBN 3-927731-02-1