Bulletin Spring‧Summer Autumn‧Winter 1999

Communicat ing i n Silence A Study of Sign Language Varieties in Hong Kong Deaf People Form Th r i v i ng Linguistic Communities Traditionally, hearing people have viewed deaf people as isolated, pathologically handicapped individuals. However, this view is not borne out by careful analysis of deaf communities and their sign languages. Since their inception in the United States in the 1960s, formal anthropological and linguistic studies of communication among deaf people around the world have demonstrated that deaf people in numerous countries form thriving linguistic communities, which are held together by sign languages that differ dramatically in structure and history from spoken languages used in the same countries. Insufficient Research on Deaf People i n Asia and Hong Kong Research thus far has been focussed on American and European sign languages. I n contrast, extremely little is known about sign languages and deaf people i n the Asia- Pacific region. Responding to this comparative lack of information, Dr. James Woodward and Dr. Gladys Tang of the Department of English applied for and successfully obtained anearmarked grant from the Research Grants Council (RGC) in 1992 to begin an in-depth formal research into sign language varieties used by deaf people in Hong Kong. Uniqueness of Sign Languages Sign languages are languages with their own grammars, They do not share the same grammatical structures with spoken languages in a given country. Hong Kong sign language has a different word order and morphology from spoken and written varieties of Chinese. For example, it puts the numerals after the noun ('books three' instead of 'three books'), and emphasizes agreement between subjects,