Sign language gets own easy-to-use dictionary

By JULIA MAHONY

Victoria Manning uses facial expressions, hand shapes and body language to communicate.

Her sign language is lightning quick to a non-signer, yet she learned it only as a 20-year-old, 16 years after losing her hearing.

Ms Manning is deaf, but for four years was New Zealand's first mental health professional working with deaf children, adults and their families.

At 31, she is now a graduate policy analyst at the Office for Disability Issues, administered by the Social Development Ministry.

Her passion is to establish sign language as New Zealand's third official language.

In communicating the importance of the new Concise Dictionary of New Zealand Sign Language, she begins with the value of a simple conversation.

"My world just changed completely with sign language, because it is a two-way communication, whereas before, although I could speak and be understood, I often couldn't understand speech coming back to me.

"With sign language, I could have arguments and discussions of concepts, and that was the first time for me at the age of 20."

In 1997, the first Dictionary of New Zealand Sign Language was published - a heavy hardback containing over 4000 signs and costing around $100.

Five years on, the editor, Graeme Kennedy, has produced the concise version - a compact soft-cover book with 2500 of the most commonly used signs for about $60.

"It will be more useful than the other one, because it's mobile, you can carry it around and refer to it," Ms Manning says. "People bought the other one, put it on the shelf and thought it was too heavy to take it down and look things up."

She says the dictionary is ideal for deaf people's families, friends and colleagues.

"If people buy it and use it, sign language will spread and communication with deaf people will improve."

Deaf children in New Zealand were taught to lip-read the English language before sign language movements began in the 1960s.

Sign language was for decades seen as an inferior form of communication.

"It was not dissimilar to what happened to Maori children, who were discouraged to speak Maori in schools," Professor Kennedy says.

"There are stories of deaf children's hands being strapped behind their backs to stop them signing. The existence of sign language was for years ignored by officialdom."

Ms Manning can lip-read, but says it is not reliable.

"I think about 80 per cent is guesswork, as only about 20 per cent of words can be seen clearly on the lips."

By the 1990s, New Zealand Sign Language - evolved from British signing - was established as the natural language for New Zealand deaf people. It has its own syntax and grammar, different from English.

Non-deaf people often express surprise that there is no global sign language.

"My response is that you need to ask that same question about spoken language," Ms Manning says.

"In America, say, it would take about a day to understand each other, develop a pidgin type of signing, using positive and negative signs and the same grammar and syntax."

Sign language expresses the deaf community's unique protocols, traditions, celebrations and humour.

"Deaf humour is very visual. Deaf jokes play on things that look similar, in comparison to English jokes, which play on sounds or play on words," Ms Manning says.

Her work at the Office for Disability Issues includes improving resources and services.

There is a shortage of qualified sign interpreters in New Zealand. Ms Manning's regular interpreter is British and was snapped up after arriving to work freelance.

Victoria University offers a diploma course which trains deaf people to become tutors in sign language, and the Auckland University of Technology has a two-year training programme for interpreters.

Professor Kennedy is based at Victoria's applied linguistics centre and is a co-editor of the New Zealand Oxford Dictionary.

He spent seven years on the first "big" sign language dictionary, which sold out.

For the concise version, more than 50 hours of video and computer technology were used to determine what signs were most common.

Each of the 2500 signs selected was hand-drawn by deaf artist Shaun Fahey.

Regional variations stem from the different deaf schools around the country, and often show religious influences or pick up on features of a town or area.

"There was an order of Catholic nuns who set up a school for the deaf in Feilding. Their sign for Friday was different from Friday everywhere else, because of the Catholic practice of eating fish on that day - the sign was of a fish," Professor Kennedy says.

The sign for the town of Picton is the same as "pig" or "greedy" and similar to "kill", because there used to be a freezing works there.

In the 1996 census, 26,000 people claimed to have some knowledge of sign language.

"We expect this concise dictionary to be around for some time," Professor Kennedy says. "We were able to show this was a real human language, just communicated in a different medium."

- NZPA