Author Query Form: Language Research and Language Community Change: Italian Sign Language 1981-2013

Author Query Form
Language research and language community change: Italian

Sign Language 1981–2013
Article: ijsl-2015-0019
Query No Page No Query
Q1 1 Please provide complete details for affiliations [1–3].
Q2 22 Please note that spelling of author “Permiss and Vigliocco
2014” has been changed to “Perniss and Vigliocco 2014”
as per reference list. Please check.
IJSL 2015; aop
Sabina Fontana*, Serena Corazza, Penny Boyes Braem 1

and Virginia Volterra
Language research and language
community change: Italian Sign 5
Language 1981–2013
DOI 10.1515/ijsl-2015-0019
Abstract: By providing evidence that sign language is an autonomous language, 10

research has contributed to various changes both within and beyond the signing
communities. The aim of this article is to show an example of how sign language
change is driven not only by language internal factors but also by changes in
language perception, as well as in the changing groups of users and the contexts
of use. Drawing from data collected at a sign language research centre in Italy 15
on Italian Sign Language during a time span of over thirty years, the present
study will show how language research was a major impetus for a new linguistic
awareness and changes in language attitude has influenced new linguistic
practices and has forced Italian signers to think about rules governing the use
of their language. 20
Keywords: attitudes, norms, sign language, language change, users, contexts
1 Introduction 25
Thirty years ago in Italy, signed communication was primarily used in informal
settings among deaf people. Today Italian Deaf 1 people can take part in a
parent-teacher discussion group on dyspraxia, go to a lecture on philosophy,
30
1 We follow here the convention of using “Deaf” to refer to a cultural Deafness and “deaf” to
refer an auditive condition as opposed to being hearing.
Q1 *Corresponding author: Sabina Fontana, University of Catania, Italy, 35

E-mail: sabina.fontana@unict.it
Serena Corazza, Università degli Studi di Trieste, Italy, E-mail: corazza54@gmail.com
Penny Boyes Braem, Center for Sign Language Research, Basel, Switzerland,
E-mail: boyesbraem@gmail.com
Virginia Volterra, Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, Rome, Italy,
E-mail: virginia.volterra@istc.cnr.it 40
2 Sabina Fontana et al.
go to a Deaf clinical psychologist, attend an engineering class at a university – 1

all situations in which communication could be offered in sign language.
The goal of this article is to review how sign language in the context of its
use in the Italian signing community has changed since research on this topic
began in Italy over thirty years ago. The authors, who have all been involved in 5
Deaf community during this period,2 began to wonder if the forms of sign
language used in Italy in more recent years are the same as those first described
as the signing of Italian Deaf people in 1981. Our hypothesis is that some forms
of signing have changed over these years, and that this change has been driven
in part by research on sign language (henceforth referred to SL). 10
The role SL research played in the Deaf community and its impact on sign
language usage and perception will be analyzed by focusing on changes in
attitudes, users and context during a time span of over thirty years. Changing
external factors such as an increased meta-linguistic awareness (fostered by SL
research) led to positive social and linguistic attitudes towards Italian Sign 15
Language (LIS) and to a higher visibility of the signing community. Changes
in attitude and increased visibility have also forced signers to formulate con-
ventions governing the correct use of their language, conventions that were
often internalized and implicitly observed when sign language was low status
and restricted to informal/familiar contexts. 20
Several previous studies have focused on change in SLs as being driven
mainly by language-internal factors (Brentari and Coppola 2013; Janzen and
Shaffer 2002; Sandler et al. 2005; Kegl et al. 1999; Senghas et al. 2004,2005)
following spoken language change research trends (Labov 2001; Bybee 2006).
Our approach here follows that of other researchers who have taken into 25
account more language-external, sociolinguistic factors that affect not a sign
language but rather the many forms of a sign language (Jepson 1991; Kisch 2008,
2012a, 2012b; Polich 2005; Russo Cardona and Volterra 2007). For investigating
language change, it is crucial to take into account cultural, social and political
factors that affect community and its behavior (Sutton Spence et al. 1990). 30
Attention must be paid to the community’s attitude towards the languages in
2 Serena Corazza is deaf and learned her sign language from her deaf parents; Sabina Fontana
is a hearing child of Deaf adults (a “CODA”), who also learned her sign language from her deaf
parents; Virginia Volterra is hearing and learned sign language 30 years ago when she began 35
some of the first linguistics studies of LIS. Penny Boyes Braem is a hearing sign language
researcher, who has been collaborating with the other three researchers since 1981. All authors
contributed to the research and analysis described in this paper. Boyes Braem wrote Sections 1
and 2, Volterra and Corazza wrote Section 3, and Fontana wrote Sections 4 and 5. We wish to
acknowledge several very helpful comments from Bencie Woll, Erin Wilkinson and Isabella
Chiari on earlier drafts of this article. 40
Language research and language community change 3
its repertoire, as one of the key factors for explaining what actually happens in 1
natural communicative contexts.
In the following sections, these factors will be described as they appeared at
the beginning of SL research in 1981, in the intermediate years, and then as they
appear to us today. We will concentrate on the language-external factors of 5
change of users, context and attitudes that we propose have influenced the
differences we see between the signing used in Italy in 1981 and in 2013. We are
not going to deal with the specific structural changes in the language that
occurred in this period (for this type of analysis, see Wilkinson et al. forthcoming).
In order to understand language change, what first needs to be taken into 10
account is the role of the users’ attitudes that, as it will be pointed out in this
article, affect the use, settings, and ultimately language practices. This seems to
have been the case for Nicaraguan Sign Language where psycholinguistic
research has shown that although predictable linguistic principles affected
patterns of language change, these changes were in turn possible because of a 15
new social context with its new norms and expectations (Nakamura 2006; Polich
2005; Senghas et al. 2005).
The community of SL users is not uniform. Members can share a language
but have different perceptions of it and experience their deafness in different
ways, depending on their type of education, job and contacts with the hearing 20
community (Monaghan et al. 2003). Thus, the involvement of Deaf people in
Italian Sign Language status and acquisition planning that Geraci (2012) has
described is triggered by a new perception and attitude towards their language.
Furthermore, research has promoted linguistic awareness as the consequence of
helping to bring about situations in which Deaf people, many for the first time, 25
have been forced to think about normativity and/or linguistic rules.
2 Attitudes, users and context in 1981 30
In 1981, the form of signing used by the Deaf in Italy did not even have a name.
The sign used for this form of communication was MIME/GESTURE3 (see Figure 1).
Hearing persons called it gesticulation or gesture language (Geraci 2012). The Deaf
persons themselves regarded it as a form of communication used to informally
35
share their ideas and their emotions. Basically, sign language was seen by them
as a sort of private code, which was felt to be both necessary in private contexts
3 Glosses reflecting only the basic meaning of the signs are conventionally written in all
capital letters. 40
10
Figure 1: LIS sign for MIME/GESTURE used to refer to
signed communication in Italy in 1981.
but also inadequate in public contexts. Although the research group at CNR
(Institute of Psychology of the National Research Council, now Institute of
15
Cognitive Sciences and Technologies) thought that this form of communication
was actually an autonomous language, evidence was needed to prove that it had
syntax and recursivity and that it, like other human languages, was arbitrary.
The researchers began referring to this kind of communication by two new
signs, SIGN COMMUNICATION and the fingerspelled sign L-I-S, based on man-
20
ual alphabet initials for Lingua Italiana dei Segni (Figure 2). The choice of these
labels for the language was made to emphasize the distinction between gesture
and sign as well as to follow the conventions being adopted by other countries
for their own SLs at the time, e.g. American Sign Language (ASL), Langue des
Signes Française (LSF) and British Sign Language (BSL).
25
30
35
Figure 2: LIS sign meaning “sign communication” used
by sign language researchers.
At the very beginning, even Deaf persons did not accept the acronym LIS and
continued to use for it the old signs MIME/GESTURE. In the words of Freire
(1970: 45), “They had made the oppressors’ views instances their own”. The 40
fingerspelled sign L-I-S only gradually came into use by Italian Deaf people who 1
then (and still today) made a limited use of fingerspelled words from the spoken
language in comparison with signers in other countries such as the United
Kingdom and the United States, who make much more use of fingerspelling
together with their sign language.4 5
How the general hearing public in Italy viewed signing ranged from a total
unawareness of this language to, when it was perceived, an assumption that this
was a form of pantomime. These views were similar to the perception of sign
languages reported for other European countries.5
The hearing majority considered deaf people as a group of disabled persons 10
who were unable to look after themselves, who needed help and support. They
labeled them deaf-mutes as many people assumed that being deaf meant being
unable to speak. Therefore deafness was systematically associated with dumb-
ness, although deaf persons were educated and were able to speak (Petitta 2012).
In the education of Italian deaf children, the use of sign language was 15
absolutely banned. The Deaf community and their language were seen as a
kind of ghetto. The schools consequently felt they had to take every measure to
prevent the deaf child from using any kind of gestures in order to force them to
communicate only by speaking and lip-reading. For the pedagogues at the time,
the use of sign language was the symbol of the failure of their speech therapy 20
efforts and a barrier in the desired path that should lead to ultimate integration
within the hearing majority. The prevailing belief was that grammar was to be
found only in the Italian spoken and written language and that sign commu-
nication did not exhibit (or possess) any grammar at all.
Deaf people did not expect that a hearing person who was not involved in 25
deafness (i.e. had no deaf relatives or was not a teacher of the deaf) would learn sign
language (Markowicz and Woodward 1975). When one of the hearing authors of this
article, Virginia Volterra, started to sign, Deaf people asked her first: “Are you deaf?”
When she answered “No I’m hearing”, they came back with the question, “Are your
mother or father deaf?” to which she replied, “No, I have hearing parents”. The Deaf 30
conversational partners then became more and more curious, as they seemed not to
understand why this hearing person had bothered to learn sign language at all. In
the end, the most time efficient and acceptable answer often was: “I’m a teacher of
deaf children” (Corazza and Volterra 2008). This scenario reflects the Italian Deaf
35
4 Today, the sign LIS has lost its fingerspelled origin and is produced as a sign in which the
handshape for I has been dropped.
5 See Proceedings of the X World Congress of the World Federation of the Deaf, Espoo, Finland
(Finnish Association of the Deaf 1987: 74); see also Proceedings of the XI World Congress of the
World Federation of the Deaf (Japanese Association of the Deaf 1991: 54). 40
signers’ assumption that members of the signing Deaf community could be only deaf 1
people or their hearing relatives or hearing educators.
When researchers asked Deaf people who were collaborating with them for
clarifications or further information about a sign, their responses usually indi-
cated that they were not really aware of having acquired a true language. No one 5
in deaf families considered their signed communication to be a language, even if
they used it with each other every day. Schools for the deaf officially declared
themselves to be oralist and typically denied the existence of signed commu-
nication. In Deaf clubs and associations, nobody was really aware that the form
of communication by which they could so richly and exhaustively share infor- 10
mation was an actual language. Similar situations have been reported for other
countries at this time (Woll et al. 1981).6
Thus it was not easy for the first Italian researchers to gain access to this
language. It also took some time for us to figure out that there was a difference
between the forms of sign language used by Deaf people among themselves and 15
the forms used between Deaf people and hearing researchers (see also Klima and
Bellugi 1979: vi). When communicating with hearing persons who had family or
professional connections with them, Deaf people usually used a widely varying
form of “contact signing” that mixed elements of sign and spoken language,
depending on the language skills of the Deaf person and the situation (Fontana 20
1999; Lucas and Valli 1989; Stokoe 1969). The most active Deaf persons, those
who played important roles in the Ente Nazionale Sordomuti (ENS, Italian National
Association of Deaf-Mutes), were often persons who had become deaf later in their
childhood and thus had good spoken Italian skills and they took every opportu-
nity to show off their speech abilities to deaf and/or hearing participants. The 25
Deaf author of this article, Serena Corazza, remembers that when she was asked
by hearing researchers to sign without using voice, other Deaf people complained.
For example, when she did not use her voice when giving a lecture and had given
over to an interpreter the task of translating her presentation from LIS to Italian,
they thought that her signing in this situation was more suitable to Deaf people 30
who were not fluent in spoken/written Italian rather than to a formal situation
such as a lecture. When another author of this article, Sabina Fontana (who is
hearing), signed to her Deaf parents without voice, her hearing grandparents
immediately criticized her, saying that she was not following the dominant con-
vention of hearing persons speaking while they signed. 35
There was among Deaf people no clear idea of the boundaries between sign
language and spoken Italian. When they talked to hearing people, often they used a
6 See also, the Proceedings X World Congress of the World Federation of the Deaf, Espoo,
Finland (Finnish Association of the Deaf 1987). 40
contact signing involving a mixture of many voiced elements with sign language 1
structure or produced signs with spoken language sentence structure. In other
words, Deaf people felt it was more appropriate to voice their signing with hearing
people, no matter what the hearing person’s competence in sign language was.
(For a report on this attitude of Deaf Italians at this time see Fontana 1997, 1999). 5
Some form of signed communication was used in 1981 by the following
groups: Deaf persons, some of their hearing relatives, a few teachers of the deaf
and by some persons from religious groups working in the Institutes for the
deaf-mutes. Signing and speech were used in different contexts. Signing was
used in Deaf clubs (with voice and also without), in Deaf families, in special 10
schools for the deaf, in cafés, at sport events and on any occasion where Deaf
people got together. Deaf people were usually ashamed to use signs openly in
more public places such as on the bus or in shops. Sign language (or, as it was
then called, mime) was not used in official contexts. It was also rarely used in
school to teach subjects such as history or geography. Only a very few open- 15
minded teachers used – unofficially – sign language with their deaf pupils. In
formal situations, spoken Italian accompanied by some signs (later was referred
to by researchers as Signed Italian / Italiano Segnato) was preferred even by Deaf
persons signing formally in groups of Deaf people. The syntax and morphology
of Signed Italian belong to Italian rather than to LIS, making it in essence a kind 20
of manually coded Italian. For example, the sentence “the lamp is over the
table” [La lampada è sul tavolo] would be expressed in Signed Italian with five
separate signs matching the words in the spoken language sentence, and
following the Italian ordering of the words. The LIS equivalent sentence would
have a structure that utilizes both hands as articulators in the 3-dimensional 25
space and would involve only three successive signs. The first two signs identify
the located objects (table and lamp). The third sign expresses the locative
arrangement between these objects using a “simultaneous” construction in
which one hand refers to table and the other hand placed above it refers to
the lamp: TABLE LAMP ROUND-OBJECT-LOCATED-OVER-FLAT-OBJECT. 30
The persons involved in interpreting at this time were not trained interpreters
but usually were Deaf persons’ relatives or teachers or priests who had learned to
use this kind of communication in Institutes for the Deaf and other situations.
When interpreting was used, the preferred form of signing was Signed Italian. The
linguistic structures later identified as typical of the sign language were consid- 35
ered inappropriate as they were viewed as being too different from the Italian
language structure. Furthermore, the persons doing the interpreting often became
involved in the interaction by adding their own information to fill the gaps of
understanding that often stemmed from the Deaf person’s inadequate accessibility
to the knowledge and information available to the surrounding hearing society. By 40
filling the gaps, however, interpreters could also influence decisions made by the 1
Deaf person who came to rely on interpreters not only for information but also for
their choices (Franchi and Maragna 2013).
Sign language was used very rarely to allow Deaf people to take part in
public events such as conferences, congresses or lectures. For example, during a 5
congress organized by the ENS in 1981, the signed interpretation consisted of a
synopsis of what the lecturer had said. In formal official situations, Deaf people
felt that it was more appropriate to speak instead of sign as a kind of basic
demonstration that they “had a voice to offer” to the hearing society.
10
3 The beginning of sign language research

in Italy
15
By the end of the 1970s, there were indications of interest in Italy about the research
on sign languages being done in other countries. A group of clinicians and psy-
chologists in Bologna (Montanini et al. 1979) edited a book Dal gesto al gesto [From
gesture to gesture] that included the translation of two formerly published linguistic
studies on American Sign Language (Klima and Bellugi 1979) as well as sociological 20
studies of the French Deaf community (Mottez 1979, 2006).
Elena Pizzuto, a young Italian linguist fresh from her studies on sign
language in Boston, came back to Sicily and began to make contacts with
young Deaf people outside of the research institutions in an effort to try to
awaken them to the new idea of regarding their form of communication as a real 25
language. One focus of this effort was to present the Italian Deaf community
with the – at that time, completely foreign – idea of sign language poetry. She
organized a meeting between a Sicilian spoken language dialect poet, Ignazio
Buttitta, and an American Deaf poet, Joseph Castronovo, whose native language
was ASL. This encounter had a great impact on the Deaf participants and on the 30
future development of signing as an art form in the country.7
Also in this same period, a group of researchers in Rome, working on
spoken language acquisition at CNR became aware of the use of some form of
signing being discussed by educators of the Deaf in the United States. They held
a meeting as an open discussion on language and deafness. These lectures were 35
later published as a book I segni come parole. La Comunicazione dei sordi [Signs
like words: the Communication of the deaf] with the addition of a lecture held in
7 One of the participants in this meeting was Rosaria Giuranna who is today one of the most
well known Deaf sign language poets in Italy. 40
1979 at the CNR by the American pioneer of ASL research, William Stokoe 1
(Volterra 1981b). The focus of the contributions was on the following areas:
history about the landmark congress held in Milan in 1880 and its implications
for the education of deaf children, language acquisition by hearing and deaf
children and a review of research on other sign languages. 5
One of the most significant parts of this book was a proposed outline for
future research on sign language in Italy. In order to carry out this program,
however, the researchers were initially confronted with the problem of how to
make contact with the Deaf community in Italy. Then, by chance, at a conference
in Rome in 1981, Virginia Volterra (who was invited as a CNR researcher to give a 10
presentation on language acquisition) met Serena Corazza, a leading figure in the
Deaf community and Deaf association in Trieste. Through their informal conversa-
tions at this conference, Corazza became curious about this new field of sign
language research, which resulted in her moving to Rome to work with the CNR
team. It was the beginning of building a bridge between hearing researchers and 15
Deaf people that has provided new insights for both groups and led to a kind of
Copernican Revolution within and beyond the signing community.
4 Changing external factors in the following years 20
The ideas set forth in the 1981 book I segni come parole [Signs like words]
(Volterra 1981b) directed the research towards the exploration of areas such as
the description of the language, its acquisition process and historical factors
related to it. At the same time, research programs in other areas were begun, 25
such as training programs for hearing and deaf professionals and the organiza-
tion of conferences. Other influential factors in these years included advances in
technology/mass media and new political demands for the official recognition of
the language. These areas will be discussed separately in the following sections.
30
4.1 Research: description and documentation of the language
The original aim of the new linguistic research on this language was to see if one
could recognize a limited set of formational parameters as well as morphological 35
and syntactical structures comparable with those of spoken languages. Italian
research was clearly influenced by the recent work on ASL published by Stokoe
(1960, 1980) and Bellugi’s teams (Klima and Bellugi 1979). The first Deaf persons
from whom we collected information on signs had acquired their SL as children,
either from birth in their family if they were children of Deaf parents, or if they 40
came from hearing families at primary school, outside of the classroom and from 1
other Deaf children or as adults at a Deaf club. As mentioned before, in all of
these cases, there was no awareness of using a true language.
The data were collected using the new video cameras that were beginning to be
available in those years, enabling the researchers to record and keep the primary 5
raw data for further analysis. (An analogous revolution had occurred earlier for
language acquisition research when, thanks to the availability of the more portable
film camera, the study of the use of gestures began.) Both hearing and Deaf persons
were not yet used to be video-recorded and the signers often appeared uncomfor-
table in such situations. When they were aware of the presence of the camera, they 10
did not sign as fluently as they normally did in informal situations.
The first results and descriptions of the signed language used by Deaf
Italians were presented at the Third International Symposium on Sign
Language Research in Rome (June 22–26, 1983). It is important to point out
here that in this Symposium there were only four or five Italian Deaf persons 15
among the more than two hundred participants. The first fuller description of
LIS in book form was published in 1987 (Volterra 2004 [1987]). One of the
research aims of the contributions to this book was to verify whether in Italian
sign language there were grammatical categories comparable to those described
for spoken and written languages. Many linguistic aspects initially described in 20
this book were later analyzed in more depth by some of the contributors, and
appeared in further publications – for example, diachronic change in lexical
items (Radutzky 1989), manual and non-manual morphology of LIS nouns and
verbs (Pizzuto et al. 1990), and LIS predicate classifiers (Corazza 1990).
Through its growing awareness of the nature of Italian sign language, the CNR 25
research group began to expand its research focus to include language acquisition
in both hearing and deaf children, and the role of gestures in the language learning
of both these groups. An early study found that although hearing and deaf children
both use single gestures and signs in early stages of acquisition, only children
exposed to sign language produce strings of two or more signs in first sentences 30
(Volterra 1981a). Another important study was a comparison of deaf children from
hearing and from Deaf families, all of whom were exposed to both LIS and Italian.
This study not only provided an assessment of their language competences but
also found evidence for the importance of the attitude of the parents towards the
two languages (Pizzuto et al. 2001; Pizzuto 2002). A study that involved teaching 35
LIS as a foreign language to hearing school children had an important impact on
the later acceptance of SL in education. The results of this study showed that these
children not only developed a positive attitude toward LIS and its users but also
improved their visual attention and visual memory skills in comparison to hearing
children not learning SL (Capirci et al. 1997, 1998). 40
All of these studies fostered a new perception of rehabilitation and educa- 1

tion for deaf pupils. Some speech therapists and some teachers had already been
looking for an alternative educational path after having realized the limits the
existing strict oralist method (which excluded any use of SL) can have in certain
contexts. These professionals began to use signed supported speech with deaf 5
preschoolers (Beronesi 1985; Beronesi et al. 1991; Massoni 1985; Massoni and
Maragna 1997). In a secondary school for the Deaf in Rome, two teachers started
an experimental project which involved using sign language to improve the oral
and written language of deaf pupils and to increase their access to information
on cultural and social topics (Pagliari Rampelli and Maragna 1985). 10
Beginning in 1990, as a consequence of the first results of research on SL in
Italy, some old schools of the Deaf became mainstreamed schools for deaf and
hearing for example in Rome at the Nomentana school (Ardito and Mignosi 1995;
Ardito et al. 2008; Russo Cardona and Volterra 2007). A few public schools
accepted more deaf children into classes with hearing pupils (e.g. the Cossato 15
School, cf. Teruggi 2003), adopting and promoting practices of true bilingual
education. Finally, new strategies and methodologies to evaluate the linguistic
competences of deaf children directly in LIS were also explored (Pizzuto 2002;
see also Elena Tomasuolo’s 2006 doctoral dissertation).
A complete description of theoretical and empirical research conducted 20
during these years on Italian sign language, language acquisition, linguistic
competence of deaf children and adults by the CNR staff of hearing and Deaf
collaborators can be found in Caselli et al. (2006 [1994]).8
Cooperation with other European sign language researchers began with a
cross-linguistic study collecting data on how signers told the same picture story 25
in their own sign language (The Snowman Project: Kyle and Woll 1985). Another
collaboration compared word order in LIS and Swiss French Sign Language
(Boyes Braem et al. 1989, 1990; Laudanna and Volterra 1991). A later collabora-
tive European project explored how hearing and deaf signers and non-signers in
six European countries interpreted a set of iconic and non-iconic LIS signs 30
(Boyes Braem et al. 2002).
New contacts with Italian universities developed into an expansion of the kinds
of research that were carried out, especially in the fields of linguistics, neurolinguis-
tics, anthropology, sociolinguistics, psychology, philosophy, education, interpreting
35
8 The contents of the book were also explained by Deaf teachers and researchers at the 4th
Seminar on LIS training (6–8 September 1996), which was organized near Bologna in coopera-
tion with the Regional Centre for linguistic and cognitive disabilities in infancy and other
organizations and associations. In 1998, Deaf researchers and teachers made the content of
this book accessible in videotaped LIS. 40
and translation. A growing interest in sign language driven by the studies 1

mentioned above resulted in the organization of sign language courses within
the universities and, in 1997, in the inclusion of LIS within the list of
languages that could be offered at the university level.9
During the first years of this interim period, from 1981 to 1991, there were 5
still no SL dictionaries of the language. Some collections of signs were devel-
oped for use by teachers of the first sign language courses for use within their
classes (Boschin and Corazza 1985; Betto et al. 1988). Beginning in 1991, several
dictionaries were published for different purposes and audiences. Four Deaf
authors published a dictionary of signs aimed at presenting and describing the 10
origins of LIS signs used in everyday Deaf life (Angelini et al. 1991). Another
dictionary, which listed the entries alphabetically by Italian word equivalents of
the sign and was targeted for hearing professionals who work with the Deaf
(speech therapists, teachers, etc.), was completed by a young Deaf student,
Orazio Romeo, who was one of the first students sponsored by the Mason 15
Perkins Funds to study at Gallaudet University for the deaf in the United
States (Romeo 1991). A third dictionary (Radutzky 1992) was built up on linguis-
tic principles for research purposes and was organized by the initial handshape
form component of the sign. In the following years, more dictionaries were
produced, some with regional variations, some with special lexicons (for 20
young children, religion etc.).
However, there was during this period still a strong debate on what name
to give to this language. Some members of the Deaf community were still tied
to old names and suggested calling it linguaggio mimico-gestuale [mimed-
gestural language], whereas others supported the name LIS (Prattella 25
Monastra 1993). This debate did not involve all the community members in
the same way. Whereas some people were still discussing these possible
names, others suggested extending the LIS acronym of lingua dei segni
italiana [Italian Sign Language] rather than lingua italiana dei segni [Signed
Italian]. The first expression was preferred by these persons in order to avoid 30
the misunderstanding that sign language was a visual form of spoken Italian.
4.2 Training courses and rising awareness
At the beginning of the linguistic study of sign language in 1981, researchers 35

were faced with two main problems: how can hearing persons and future
interpreters learn the language and how can Deaf persons be trained to teach
9 Today LIS is offered in several Italian Universities, e.g. in Venice, Trieste, Rome and Catania. 40
and research the language? The training of interpreters and of Deaf sign lan- 1
guage teachers were closely intertwined in these early years.
Interpreting previously had been done by untrained hearing persons, who
were proficient in the language, many of who had learned this form of commu-
nication from their Deaf parents.10 In the following years, more courses began to 5
be offered but on an irregular basis.
Between 1980 and 1992, several new associations were founded throughout
Italy specifically to promote Italian Sign Language teaching and interpreting
training.11 In some towns, these groups also set up interpreter training programs
and workshops on special topics for which they often invited experts from 10
abroad.12
Deaf people have made important contributions to the assessment of the
new interpreting profession by making explicit their needs and their expecta-
tions as users of interpreting services. From 1995 on, LIS was used in all public
events organized by the Deaf Association (ENS), an indication of the positive 15
attitude of its Board towards LIS. In the same year, ENS began various sign
language related-activities including LIS courses in all its local branches, as well
as conferences and committees on LIS and on the topic of sign language courses
and schooling. In 1995, the ENS local branch in Trieste, in cooperation with the
CNR and the School of Interpreting and Translation of the University of Trieste, 20
organized the first National Conference on Sign Language that was opened by a
presentation by the pioneer American Sign Language researcher, William Stokoe
(Caselli and Corazza 1997). These conferences and their proceedings were impor-
tant venues for presenting recent research on linguistics and discussing the most
25
10 One of the first official training courses was organized to train just the three interpreters
needed for the Third International Symposium on Sign Language Research in 1983 (Stokoe and
Volterra 1985), Maria Luisa Franchi, Anna Maria Peruzzi and Anna Maria Tremonti, coordinated
by Maria Luisa Verdirosi. Peruzzi and Verdirosi both had deaf parents, in the case of Franchi 30
only the father was deaf, Tremonti had hearing parents but was a teacher at the Institute for the
Deaf. Sharon Neuman Solow and Marina McIntire, two experienced ASL interpreter trainers,
were invited to train this group for the Rome Symposium.
11 These associations include the SILIS Group in Rome, the Cooperative D.I.R.E. in Turin, the
Association Orgoglio Sordo [Deaf Pride] in Milan, Lislandia in Torino, and the Cooperative Elfo
in Florence. 35
12 The already established contacts and exchanges with American research institutions were
reinforced and expanded during these years, thanks to the program of the Mason Perkins
Deafness Fund and the Fulbright Commission. The young Italian Deaf students who have
received one-year scholarships from this fund to study at Gallaudet have come back to Italy
and become important leaders in a variety of different fields, such as sign language teaching,
bilingual education, sign language research, human rights and film making. 40
relevant experiments in education of deaf children.13 Books on sign language 1

teaching based on a methodology developed for teaching ASL were translated
into Italian (Gruppo SILIS and Mason Perkins Deafness Fund 1997, 1998).
In 1988, the European Parliament started a path for leading to the recogni-
tion of all national sign languages and encouraged the building up of courses 5
and interpreting services, of TV programs involving SL and of SL dictionaries
(Geraci 2012). In 1992, a special law on the rights of the handicapped person was
passed in Italy. While this law does not specifically mention LIS, it does
recommend “professionals who work in universities to facilitate and support
the process of learning of non-hearing students”. By providing the opportunity 10
of obtaining a LIS interpreter, this law (modified in 1999, cf. Maragna and
Marziale 2012), represented a turning point for Deaf students. Due to this law,
the number of graduating Deaf students, previously very low, increased very
rapidly.14 This expansion was complemented with an increase of the number of
SL interpreters, an outcome that built upon years of LIS course offered by local 15
ENS associations and interpreting training programs.
4.3 Deaf history, culture and arts

20
A growing metalinguistic awareness of the language, together with the pressure
to meet new needs of signing Italian Deaf people, led to a new way of looking at
the use of LIS and its community. These changing attitudes had the effect of
bestowing a new prestige not only on the sign language of the Deaf community,
but also to Deaf history and Deaf identity. A new sign language literature began 25
to emerge together with this growing interest in Deaf history and culture.
In 1989, a group of hearing and Deaf colleagues at CNR began to research
the history of the Institute of the Deaf at Via Nomentana (where the CNR team
had its office since 1988). This research involved comparing written texts (books
and papers) and unwritten records drawn from interviews with deaf pupils who 30
attended the school in the past years (cf. Pinna et al. 1993). Another group of
13 For the conference in Genoa in 1998, an exhibition I segni come parole [Signs like words]
was set up with the cooperation of the ENS and of the National Institute of the Deaf. The 35
exhibition then moved to Rome and later became a web site. This site is still active with a
complete list of all publications on LIS updated to 2011 (http://www.istc.cnr.it/mostralis,
accessed 19 October 2014).
14 In the same period, many events were organized by the EUD (European Union of the Deaf)
and by the WFD (World Federation of the Deaf) in order to promote “Deaf Leadership” and
linguistic and cultural awareness. Many Italian Deaf took part in these workshops. 40
Deaf researchers began to investigate the history of the language itself, looking 1
especially at the use of signing in Italy before it had been banned by the Milan
Congress in 1880 (Celo 2001; Corazza 1995; Folchi and Mereghetti 1995;
Pigliacampo 2001).
These historical explorations discovered that there had been several 5
Institutes for the Deaf throughout the entire Italian peninsula (Zatini 1995) in
which deaf pupils were already bilingual. Although the term “bilingualism” was
not yet used, these pupils used some form of signing and were also learning
some form of written and spoken Italian. After the banning of signing in the
classroom by the Milan Congress, signing remained in use among deaf children 10
outside the classrooms in schoolyards and dormitories. Although their bilingual
status was not recognized at the time, the majority of Italian deaf children and
adults were what some researchers today would call bimodal bilinguals (i.e.
signed/spoken language bilinguals). Some of these historical studies were pre-
sented at the first Deaf Way International Conference Festival, organized by 15
Gallaudet University in Washington (July 9–14, 1989).
In 1989, Massimo Facchini, a pioneer in the study of Deaf history,15 died and
the following year a meeting in his honor was organized in Bologna. The
American researcher, Harlan Lane, who knew the work by Facchini on the
Milan Congress and had been corresponding with him, attended this conference. 20
Lane’s talk has been published, together with other papers by hearing and deaf
authors, in Passato e presente: uno sguardo sull’educazione dei sordi in Italia
[Past and present: a look at Deaf education in Italy] (Porcari Li Destri and
Volterra 1995). This book reflected an emerging awareness of the Italian Deaf
as being members of a suppressed language minority group that had a need to 25
look both at its past and its future. All of these historical studies have revealed
that attitudes towards the deaf person in Italy have been dynamic, having
swung back and forth between opposing attitudes.
Another very influential conference was Cultura del gesto, cultura della
parola. Viaggio antropologico nel mondo dei sordi [Culture of gesture, culture of 30
word. An anthropological journey in the Deaf world] organized in Rome at the
University La Sapienza in 1996 by a group of committed young students.16
In 1997, the first Deaf art festival was held in Trieste and provided a unique
opportunity for a broader sharing of Deaf signing culture and arts. A conference
on “La Cultura e la Lingua Visiva dei Sordi: la Poesia in Lingua dei Segni” 35
15 Facchini was an otolaryngologist interested in Deaf history and in social aspects of deafness.
He was influenced by Bernard Mottez, who was one of his friends.
16 A leading figure among these students was Amir Zuccalà, whose group also started the first
LIS course in an academic context (cf. Zuccalà 1997). 40
[Deaf visual language and culture: poetry in sign language] was organized in 1
Rome at CNR in 2001.17 Looking back, one can clearly see that all of these
cultural and artistic events played an important role in the growing metalinguis-
tic awareness about LIS.
5
4.4 Technology and mass media
The first news program with the sign language interpreting was broadcast on a
private television station in 1993 and on a public station in 1994. In the following
10
years, the number of news programs interpreted into sign languages increased
and sign interpreters were often involved in public conferences and events.
Since 1995, the President of the Republic’s end-of-year speech on public televi-
sion has been interpreted into LIS. Together with the dictionaries, this recurring
event has played a crucial role in the beginning of a standardization process of
15
LIS similar to the one that took place for Italian in respect to local dialects with
the coming of television. The large linguistic variation found in sign languages
was due to the historical isolation of the various Deaf communities whose
members did not travel at a great distance and/or on a frequent basis.
New communication technologies have enabled signers to see how others
20
are signing, leading to a kind of standardization. This process has taken place in
two phases: a passive stage of standardization influenced by LIS interpreting
services in TV news. The second phase came about with the increased use of
Skype and social networks in which signers can communicate with each other
visually in LIS (see section below).
25
An interactive videodisk on the Savannah Animals (that became soon after a
CD ROM) was developed in cooperation with Olivetti (Opera Multimedia 1994).18
This was the first technological support for the bilingual education model based
on the simultaneous exposure to similar content expressed in LIS and written
Italian. Information about the Savannah and its animals were presented entirely
30
in a visual modality through both language means (written texts in Italian and
videotaped explanations in LIS) and non-language means (documentary videos
and graphic clarifications). The videodisk was used with deaf children in con-
trolled educational contexts (Caselli et al. 1993) and in the following years was
followed by many other technological products (Di Renzo et al. 2010).
35
17 Sette poesie in Lingua dei Segni Italiana (LIS) [Seven poems in Italian Sign Language (LIS)]
by Rosaria Giuranna and Giuseppe Giuranna were published in a CD ROM edited by Pizzuto
and Russo.
18 This work was greatly encouraged by the American ASL linguist, Carol Padden, who spent a
month in Rome at CNR Institute and influenced various aspects the Deaf community of Rome. 40
5 Attitudes, users and context today 1
The change of attitudes about Deaf people and their language in both Deaf and
hearing Italian society more than thirty years after SL research began can be
seen in two situations, both of which involve naming: (1) Deaf people today 5
accept that their form of communication is called LIS (Italian Sign Language); (2)
A major indication of a changed perception of deafness within the larger hearing
Italian Society is the (2006) Italian law that officially decrees that the word
“deaf” has to be substituted for the word “deaf-mute” in all official acts.
Ironically, the Deaf community itself still uses the old LIS sign DEAF, with the 10
index finger moving from the ear to the mouth (see Figure 3).
15
20
Figure 3: The old LIS sign DEAF.
Many Deaf people now openly defend their right to use sign language and are 25
vigilant against possible misunderstandings by hearing people. For example, in
a 2011 draft of a law for recognition of this language, an attempt by some
politicians to change the name of the language from LIS to Linguaggio mimico-
gestuale [mimed-gestural language] ignited a strong reaction within the Deaf
community (Geraci 2012).19 30
Within the hearing society, the linguistic and community awareness of LIS
as a language is, however, generally much more widespread compared to the
past. This awareness has had a very important effect not only on the
19 The old conflict between the sociocultural and the medical perspective was still evident in the 35
reports of the discussions going on inside the Italian Parliament in the last two years. The United
Nation Convention on equal opportunities for people with disabilities promotes sign language and
interpreting services. The Convention, ratified by the Italian Government in 2009, has not yet been
implemented into a law giving official recognition to Italian Sign Language. It has, however,
resulted in different kinds of activities to promote LIS and its recognition by the Italian
Government such as the Deaf movement Lissubito (www.lissubito.it, accessed 8 October 2014). 40
standardization process of LIS but also in the perception of deafness itself, 1

which is gradually shifting from being a “disability” to a more positive and
neutral concept related to “diversity” (Bauman and Murray 2009).
There has been an overall large increase in the number of signers of LIS.
Many of the new signers are now hearing persons who learn sign language 5
only because they are interested in it per se, as happens for any language.
Other hearing signers are not only Deaf persons’ parents and relatives but also
their teachers, school teaching assistants, interpreters, speech therapists,
social workers and friends. Some hearing people have reached a good com-
petence in sign language. Contacts between Deaf and hearing people today 10
take place quite often with LIS, either directly as more hearing persons can
sign or through an increased utilization of sign language interpreters, most of
whom are now professionally trained (Corazza and Volterra 2008). The pre-
sence of sign language interpreters in various contexts has itself resulted in an
enlargement of the lexicon by the creation and use of new lexical items 15
(Fontana and Zuccalà 2012) and above all in a growing complexity at the
syntactic level.
LIS is used in several different educational contexts today. The opportunities
for having a LIS interpreter have grown in universities and professional training
courses. This has had the additional effect of making more and more hearing 20
teachers and professionals aware of the deaf children’s linguistic rights.20
At the lower school level, there are presently two bilingual schools in Italy
(in Cossato and Rome) where LIS is taught as a subject and is used in literacy
contexts to reflect on aspects of linguistics related both to signed and written
language. In most schools there is a signing teaching assistant who helps give 25
deaf children access to class activities.
LIS is being used for teaching various subjects in schools and in institutions
of higher learning, as well as in research, to convey complex and specific
information. LIS and written language contact has increased also because of
the growing need to convey in LIS subjects that are usually written in Italian. 30
Both the hearing and the Deaf students have an increasing need to translate
between LIS and written Italian. The improved level of education of Deaf
students and the number of opportunities to learn about sign language and
languages have in general increased linguistic awareness within the Deaf Italian
population on the boundaries between Italian and Italian sign language. 35
Deaf people now take part in determining many issues related to their
quality of life, e.g. interpreter services and training. There are also now a larger
number of Deaf persons working professionally in areas connected to sign
20 See the website: www.françoisgrosjean.ch/Italian_italien.pdf, accessed 19 October 2014. 40

language (research, teaching, creating materials). Several Deaf students are 1

studying linguistics, sociolinguistics, etc. at university level and becoming
more aware of theories and models of language analysis. Other Deaf profes-
sionals are teaching in bilingual schools or work in mainstream schools in
cooperation with hearing teachers and support assistants. The involvement of 5
Deaf teachers in sign language courses creates continuously new opportunities
for reflection on sign language; attendance at conferences and training courses
give opportunities for thinking about and sharing views on the LIS lexicon and
its linguistic structure. As Deaf people’s experience of the world increases, their
language correspondingly needs to react by expanding the lexicon and language 10
structures.
All these factors combined have produced very important results in terms of
metalinguistic awareness at various levels. As their sign language is now used in
many more different contexts ranging from the formal to the informal, Deaf
people have learned to look at it as their own language without its past stigma. 15
There is no more shame or difficulties in using sign language anywhere: in
restaurants, in buses or trains or plane, on the road or in the work place. Deaf
people can take now part in many conferences, congresses and meetings,
especially those concerning welfare, educational, linguistic issues. In several
international and national TV shows, as well as movies and even in cartoons, 20
there are persons or characters that use sign language.
LIS has become for many Deaf and hearing people the symbol of the Deaf
community. It is used in different contexts to talk about a wide range of different
topics that can be far from deafness. In the transition years, a large number of
different kinds of events (theater, seminars, workshop, conferences) were orga- 25
nized in order to promote sign language and the signing community. At the
present time, however, the number of Deaf events seems to have decreased, as
more and more events unrelated to deafness are being made accessible to Deaf
people. Deaf people are now faced with many different new communicative
situations in which previously Italian was required but where now they are 30
expected to sign, and consequently are sometimes forced to create new signs
to talk about subjects they have never talked about before.
New technologies for video communication systems in which sign
language can be used (such as video chats like “ooVoo”, or visual blogs like
“Vlog”) are also contributing to the standardization of sign language and to 35
the sharing of identity and community issues. Increased signed communica-
tion through social networks has resulted in Deaf people tending to feel like
members of a wider community beyond their immediate geographical bound-
aries. By using these networks, Deaf people are sharing their opinions on
different kinds of subjects, ranging from football matches to the structural 40
aspects of sign language.21 Through these new networks, standardization is 1

taking place – in terms of a conscious decision making process: a new form of
LIS literature (poetry, stories, comedy and dramas) is being created and shared
within and beyond the local community.
However, at the same time, it is important to recognize that the emergence 5
and sharing of linguistic awareness is not homogeneous in the Italian Deaf
community. Although the community represents by its very existence a reaction
to the “normalization” and “medical” views of deafness, there are still many
Deaf persons today who experience their being deaf as a handicap and many
still do have not a clear idea of what sign language is. This multi-faceted 10
situation is reflected in interpreting services which can be highly professional
and highly helpful with old-fashioned interpreters using Signed Italian in formal
situations or assisting the deaf rather than “providing only an appropriate
translation of the message”. This type of interpreting occurs mainly with Deaf
people who live in small towns or villages and who have few occasions to learn 15
about SL research and different ways of being deaf.
At the present time, the many faces of deafness found in Deaf communities
are connected to the differing degrees of linguistic and cultural awareness. We
have seen that members of a community belonging to the same cohort can
experience deafness in different ways. To investigate language change, it is 20
necessary to go beyond the concept of “cohort”, a concept that is based on an
artificial homogeneity. Community is heterogeneous by definition, as it is made
up of different social and linguistic practices involving different people, with
different competencies and different degree of awareness towards sign language
(cf. for example Kisch 2012b). This means, as we have seen in the Italian Deaf 25
community, that one cohort can include people of the same generation who
have different attitudes and degree of awareness towards deafness.
For the first time in the history of Italian Deaf people, sign language has a
social status; it has become a language to teach, to talk about, to reflect upon, to
fight for. This has forced Deaf people to think about language norms and usage 30
they have never had to consider before. There had been no need to think about
the norms of a stigmatized language such as sign language used to be. Sign
language research, together with its implications, has played a big role in
gradually modifying the users’ perception of their language. Sociocultural
changes that have been partially influenced by SL research today resemble in 35
many ways changes to the Italian language stemming from the fifteenth century
printing Cultural Revolution. In both these cases, users of a language had to
21 A very interesting example is the website dedicated to LIS translation of famous idioms:
traduciamoinsiemeinlis.blogspot.it, accessed 29 September 2014. 40
begin to search for a norm: i.e. after becoming aware of what their language is, 1
having to start to work in the direction of how it should be by creating as
examples dictionaries and grammars (Richardson 2007, 2014).
5
6 Summary and conclusion
We propose that new linguistic reflections by the users on their sign language
can be traced fairly directly to the sociolinguistic factors related to the practice
and availability of sign language research that we have reviewed in the previous 10
sections. In this sense, the signers’ new search for language norms is the result
of a revolution, which has led to the promotion and maintenance of the sign
language.
When sign language started to be used beyond traditional confines of Deaf
clubs and Deaf families, it became more visible and accessible to a larger deaf 15
and hearing public all over Italy. When Deaf people faced the many contexts in
which sign language started to be involved, they realized that it lacked many
lexical items needed for these new situations, as well as a more elaborated
grammar. In other words, sign language had to be functional in order to meet
the different expectations and contexts, to which Deaf people for the first time 20
had access. Also emerging out of this new context were new professions invol-
ving sign language. Both Deaf and hearing persons were becoming involved:
Deaf sign language teachers, hearing sign language interpreters, deaf and hear-
ing signing teaching assistant or educators or researchers.
By drawing a line between what was sign language and what was not, the 25
first sign language research showed that LIS was an autonomous language,
which included having a grammar with its own rules. One of the factors that
have been very important for establishing new norms is an overriding desire
to promote sign language autonomy. From this followed the criterion that
language forms and/or structures that were somehow linked to or associated 30
with Signed Italian – or more generally to spoken Italian – were rejected as
such. Sign language was now regarded as being good and prestigious in itself,
whereas Signed Italian now indicated a lack of linguistic awareness and sign
language skill.
Another criterion for the new norms stemmed from the need to separate 35
clearly Deaf signs from hearing gestures. Related to this was an important new
necessity felt by researchers for justifying and appropriately describing the pre-
sence of visual iconicity in signed languages, which have been described by
earlier researchers in diachronic terms as moving away from iconicity towards
ever more abstract and arbitrary formational constraints (Frishberg 1979). Most 40
early sign language research was based on categories developed for the spoken 1
language (i.e. an assimilationistic perspective) that has generally caused difficul-
ties in explaining the iconicity of sign language in relation to the traditional
radically arbitrary nature of language. Except for some early exceptions (Boyes
Braem 1980, 1986; Wilcox 1993; Taub 2001), it has only been in more recent years 5
that a greater number of sign language researchers have developed autonomous
paradigms of sign language analysis that explain how iconicity and arbitrariness
can co-exist in sign language structure as well as recognize how iconicity and
visual metaphor is pervasive at all levels of sign language. (For a discussion on
this changing view of sign language researchers, cf. Pizzuto et al. 1998; Pizzuto 10
and Volterra 2000; Boyes Braem et al. 2002; Russo 2005; Cuxac and Antinoro
Q2 Pizzuto 2010; Perniss et al. 2010; Perniss and Vigliocco 2014).
The set of norms and rules of appropriateness focused upon in sign lan-
guage research influenced sign language teaching and sign language interpreter
training. In the teaching of their own sign language, both in the preparation of 15
what they would teach and in being confronted by hearing students who wanted
to know the rules for a particular usage, Deaf people had – for the first time – to
think about what were the rules or norms of their language. At the beginning,
these Deaf teachers had no models. Before 1980, the only model available to
them was (spoken and written) Italian. In the first sign language courses,22 as it 20
was still unclear how sign language worked at the morphological and syntactic
levels, what was actually taught was mainly a list of signs and the sentences
presented often followed the order of Italian structures. Some LIS signs (espe-
cially LIS idioms) were not considered appropriate as they were viewed as being
slang forms. In the sign language classroom, as in other formal situations, 25
manually coded Italian (“Signed Italian”) was always preferred.
The new sign language classes were thus forcing the Deaf teachers to think
about what was “proper” and “uniform” and therefore teachable in their lan-
guage. This was reflected in developing new teaching methods, which were
based on LIS rather than on Italian (greatly influenced by the already developed 30
VISTA method for ASL) as well as in the process of creating teaching materials,
both as printed text and video materials. The first Italian sign language diction-
aries were created for teaching purposes in the first LIS courses for interpreter
training.
At the same time, the involvement of LIS Deaf teachers in research opened up 35
for the entire research team new challenges for their understanding of sign
language structure, insights that were then also useful in teaching settings. The
22 Sabina Fontana attended one of these courses in a Sicilian ENS local branch at the end of
the 1980s. 40
role of research had been become so important that it even began to influence how 1
the Deaf community thought it should go about creating new signs. A misunder-
standing arose that new signs had to come from sign language researchers and
teachers because “they know the rules”.23 In a bizarre twist, in the absence of a
norm, signers perceived as prescriptive what researchers regarded as descriptive. 5
With the development of sign language awareness, the new generations of
interpreters were expected to use sign language, LIS, and not Signed Italian.
They were also trained to not have a paternalistic attitude toward their Deaf
client, i.e. they were not to decide anything for the Deaf person in order to avoid
fostering any dependency. Although these newer interpreters still represented a 10
bridge between the hearing and the Deaf community and often were faced with
many lexical gaps for the translation of words or concepts nobody had ever
talked about before in sign language, they were not allowed to create a sign.
They were expected to ask Deaf people what was the best sign to codify that
meaning or as a fallback measure, to simply fingerspell the Italian word. This 15
meant that in interpreting services, Deaf people played a very important role not
only in choosing the “correct” sign which could be later be sanctioned by its use
by the Deaf community, but also in defining what was a “good” interpreter who
provided full true access to information (Fontana 2013). Deaf people (mainly LIS
teachers) censored signed forms, which were not considered correct and decided 20
which and how interpreters should work. The norms and rules developed in
these situations have cascaded out to influence dictionary making and the use of
Italian Sign Language in all kinds of media and social communication.
In this article we have described the Italian situation in the use of signs
when SL research began and the various factors, which have affected changes in 25
contexts, attitudes and users between 1981 and the present. We have provided
evidence that the modern view of LIS as a “real”, “good” and “prestigious”
language was founded on norms that could never have been created without the
new research’s initial clear vision of sign language as an autonomous system.
From this followed the identification of norms and rules that distinguish LIS 30
from Signed Italian as well as from co-speech gestures and mime.
The multimodal structures of this language that used to be stigmatized as
“slang” by its users became the basis of the new norms, as well as being
fascinating for hearing non-signers – and especially linguists. In this selection
process, the decisions for the norms were made and supported by the Deaf users 35
themselves. Video communication facilities and new information technology
23 For example, some time ago, there was an interesting debate between CNR deaf researchers
and a deaf man who had previously said on the visual blog “vlogsordi” that it was up to them to
find a sign for “Deafhood”. 40
have played an important role in the sharing of linguistic views and choices, 1
spreading them to a deaf and hearing community that is now much wider than
the originally intended local signing community. In this sense, language change
cannot be analyzed only by focusing separately on structural and social aspects
because the two levels are strongly interconnected. Changes do not occur in a 5
laboratorial vacuum but are the products of a complex historical, social and
political context (Polich 2005; Kisch 2012b). In short, the process of awareness
initiated in no small part by sign language research has been carried on by a
new Italian signing community that, once it understood that their language was
valuable, has worked hard to understand how their language works and to 10
determine rules for use in teaching and in interpreting. Still ahead is dealing
with the issue of a growing need for writing sign language, which presently
involves intense metalinguistic activity in the laboratory for SignWriting created
in 2006 at the CNR. But this is a topic is for a future chapter of Deaf history.
15
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Language research and language community change: Italian

Sabina Fontana*, Serena Corazza, Penny Boyes Braem 1

Abstract: By providing evidence that sign language is an autonomous language, 10

Keywords: attitudes, norms, sign language, language change, users, contexts

Q1 *Corresponding author: Sabina Fontana, University of Catania, Italy, 35

go to a Deaf clinical psychologist, attend an engineering class at a university – 1

2 Attitudes, users and context in 1981 30

3 The beginning of sign language research

4 Changing external factors in the following years 20

4.1 Research: description and documentation of the language

All of these studies fostered a new perception of rehabilitation and educa- 1

and translation. A growing interest in sign language driven by the studies 1

4.2 Training courses and rising awareness

At the beginning of the linguistic study of sign language in 1981, researchers 35

relevant experiments in education of deaf children.13 Books on sign language 1

4.3 Deaf history, culture and arts

4.4 Technology and mass media

5 Attitudes, users and context today 1

Figure 3: The old LIS sign DEAF.

standardization process of LIS but also in the perception of deafness itself, 1

20 See the website: www.françoisgrosjean.ch/Italian_italien.pdf, accessed 19 October 2014. 40

language (research, teaching, creating materials). Several Deaf students are 1

aspects of sign language.21 Through these new networks, standardization is 1

Modality and structure in signed and spoken languages, 199–223. Cambridge: 1

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