Talk:Martha's Vineyard Sign Language

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I made some corrections to this page to show that the MVSL originated in the "weald" of County Kent and not "Weald, England". There is no such town as would be suggested by that punctuation. The "weald" is a geographic term to denote a woodland. Weald's are known throughout England and this one was in the Country Kent.

I also gave more specific details about the evolution of MVSL. It was originally Kent Sign Language that evolved into a distinct language in the village of Chilmark on Martha's Vineyard. Later it combined with French signs to form MVSL. There's a great deal more that can be added to this page. The major reference that is freely available is Nora Ellen Groce's "Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language", but a great deal is to be found in Edward Fay's research and also that of Alexander Graham Bell's papers. Also, Harlan Lane's "When The Mind Hears" has some excellent discussion. This is of interest to me because I am descended from one of the families whom Groce identifies as being a source of hereditary deafness in Martha's Vineyard.

[edit] no direct evidence for Old Kentish Sign Language

This page -- actually, the answers.com clone of it -- is currently being discussed on the sign language linguistics mailing list slling-L. Dr. Bencie Woll, Chair of Sign Language and Deaf Studies and Director of the Deafness, Cognition and Language Research Centre, University College London, writes in that discussion (quoted here by permission):

Actually, there's no evidence that there was a signing Deaf community in Kent or that any of the people who went to Martha's Vineyard from Kent were deaf. I quote from a paper by Chris Stone and myself which will appear in Sign Language Studies:

It should be noted that there is only circumstantial evidence available to substantiate claims about the earlier existence of an Old Kent Sign Language in the Kentish Weald (Groce, 1985). Groce states that she was 'unable to discover any direct references to deafness in the Weald during the seventeenth century' (pp. 29-30), and adds (p. 30), 'From a passage in Samuel Pepys's diary, it is clear that Downing knew a sign language'. Groce then conjectures (30), 'It seems likely that as a boy in Maidstone in 1630 he learned the local sign language." But since all we know for sure is that Downing went to school in Kent, not that there were any deaf people in the Weald of Kent during the 17th century, the belief in an Old Kentish Sign Language is actually unsupported by any direct evidence.

See also the caution in the last paragraph of Old Kent Sign Language, quoting Woll, Sutton-Spence, & Elton (2001):

Others have cautioned against uncritical reception of this claim, "because no deaf people were part of the original migration from Kent, and nothing is known about any specific variety of signing used in Kent."

Thnidu 17:51, 2 July 2007 (UTC)

I have modified the article to make the hypothetical status of OKSL explicit.

Thnidu 18:03, 2 July 2007 (UTC)