A new University of Cambridge study calls on the Indian government to address an ongoing educational crisis by recognising Indian Sign Language as an official language.
Around one in five (over 19 per cent) of India’s deaf and hard-of-hearing children were out-of-school in 2014, according to an official Indian government survey. The new UK study wants a rejection “oralism”, the belief that deaf people can and should communicate exclusively by lipreading and speech, and opening more schools and higher education institutes for deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) students.
Study author Dr Abhimanyu Sharma, from Cambridge’s Faculty of Modern & Medieval Languages & Linguistics, said: “Many thousands of children who are deaf or hard-of-hearing are missing out on school in India. This has a huge impact on their wellbeing and life chances.
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“One of the main reasons for this very high dropout rate is that their schools do not offer education in sign language.”
Dr Sharma’s study, published this week in ‘Language Policy’, explains that sign language continues to be “shunned” in most Indian schools because it is still stigmatised as a visible marker of deafness. But, he argues, the alternative preferred by many schools, “oralism” harms the school attainment of deaf students.
He explains: “Outside of India, ‘oralism’ is widely criticised but the majority of schools in India continue to use it. Gesturing is not sign language, sign language is a language in its own right and these children need it.
“When I was in primary school in Patna, one of my fellow students was deaf. Sign language was not taught in our school and it was very difficult for him. I would like to support the charities, teachers and policymakers in India who are working hard to improve education for such students today.”
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Dr Sharma acknowledges that the Indian government has taken important steps to make education more inclusive and welcomes measures such as the establishment of the Indian Sign Language Research and Training Centre in 2015. But he calls for far more work to ensure that DHH students receive the education which they need and to which they are legally entitled.
Sharma calls for constitutional recognition for Indian Sign Language (ISL) as well as recognition of ISL users as a linguistic minority. Being added to India’s de facto list of official languages would direct more government financial support to Indian Sign Language.
