Lilit Marcus
Filed to: languages
4/13/15 3:35pm
FlyGirl
The first time was at a coffee shop in the Old Jaffa port of Israel. There is a deaf-and-blind theater company there, and next door a coffee shop staffed entirely by deaf employees raises money for the theater. There are laminated menus there that show basic signs in Hebrew Sign Language.
When our waitress came over, I immediately began chatting away in my native language, American Sign Language (ASL). It’s a language I feel more comfortable in than Hebrew, Hebrew Sign Language, and sometimes even English. The waitress rolled her eyes and walked away.
Two minutes later, a different employee came over. “What the fuck are you doing?” he demanded in snappy ASL. “You’re cheating.” And just like that, we were bickering like siblings. Soon, we were chatting away about my experiences traveling in Israel and his desire to visit America.
Like many young Deaf people I’ve met around the world, he was learning ASL in hopes of attending Gallaudet University, the world’s only university exclusively for the deaf and hard-of-hearing. It’s where my own parents met and fell in love as undergraduates. Because of Gallaudet (as well as the National Technical Institute for the Deaf at the Rochester Institute of Technology), many deaf men and women around the world are learning ASL in addition to their native languages, to the point where it is becoming as ubiquitous a second language as English in some countries.
One of the most common misconceptions about sign language is that it’s universal across nations. I always make a point of saying that I’m fluent in American Sign Language to drive that point home, but people still want to know if I was involved in any deaf community stuff when I lived in England (no, I don’t know British Sign Language) or if I knew that the Mandela funeral interpreter was a phony (no, I also don’t know South African Sign Language).
Probably because I grew up bilingual, I’ve always liked learning languages
