Not Modern Enough: Lexical Anxieties Over Jordanian Sign Language (Poster 39)

• In Event: AERA Promising Scholarship in Education Research: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

This poster focuses on a project at a government advocacy body for disabled Jordanians to assess the current state of sign language and deaf education in Jordan, as part of a broader project examining deaf Jordanians' engagements with new assistive technologies, such as cochlear implants and sign language-centered mobile applications, that have emerged there in the last two decades. Even as this government entity insisted that deaf Jordanians should have access to Jordanian Sign Language (LIU, from the Arabic lughat al- 'ishara al-'urduniyyah), one of the concerns foregrounded in the project was that LIU did not contain sufficient technical and scientific vocabulary—that is, that it was insufficiently “modern”—to be the language of instruction in Jordanian deaf schools. Some staff even expressed doubts about the language’s grammaticality, despite research that has demonstrated to the contrary (Hendriks 2008; Al-Fityani 2010). Such anxieties over the state of LIU—whether, as my interlocutors expressed, it had sufficient capacity to “meet the needs” of the Jordanian deaf community today—reflect a denotational bias: that if there is not a word for a particular concept, it cannot be expressed. Rather, I demonstrate through ethnographic observations in deaf Jordanian classrooms that teachers proficient in LIU in fact draw upon a range of semiotic resources to teach, such as drawing on the board, pointing, and gesturing, to discuss even technical subjects like physics and biology, demonstrating the full communicative capacity of LIU. I draw on this case to demonstrate the importance of ethnography for pushing back against misunderstandings about what language is and how it is used.

Author

• Timothy Y Loh, Princeton Society of Fellows