Dagmara Dąbek: In this community, however, everyone has a different story. How many deaf people live in Poland?
Anna Goc, author of the book “Głusza”*: About half a million. This group includes people who were born deaf and those who have lost their hearing. According to the estimates of the Polish Association of the Deaf, Polish sign language is used by about one hundred thousand people. Among them there are deaf bilinguals who are fluent in both Polish and PJM, as well as deaf people for whom Polish is a foreign language.
And most of these people tried to learn Polish?
Most of the deaf people I have spoken to over the years have learned to speak clearly and lip read – this was their childhood goal. Just what does it mean? Does learning to speak, to articulate words, always mean learning a language? they wonder today.
One of the protagonists of “Głusza”, who can hear, recalls a reading circle she organized for deaf women. It took them several weeks to read and understand the book that children in elementary school study. Deaf women could not understand what they read, even though they had graduated from schools for the deaf.
In “Głusza” I tried to show what many deaf people talk about – how hard it is to learn a language you can’t hear and how hard it is to start talking when you can’t hear your own voice. Some deaf people learned to lip-read words as children, though they don’t remember how they did it. Others read only some words and try to guess the meaning of the utterance from the context. There are deaf people who prefer to meet without an interpreter because they speak clearly and thanks to hearing aids or implants they can understand my questions. But others, despite the effort and many years of rehabilitation, have not learned to speak and are unable to understand what hearing people are saying. I’ve met deaf people who were happy to learn to talk and deaf people who didn’t. Many of them today, as adults, assess the years of rehabilitation – some talk about high standards, others about violence.
What was the hardest thing about learning Polish for deaf people?
I asked Małgorzata Talipska, one of the protagonists of “Głusza”, a leader of the milieu and president of the Institute of Deaf Affairs, about it. She asked me to imagine a scene like this: mother and daughter walking to the park. Mom tells the girl about birds, then she meets her neighbor, they talk for a while, she picks up the phone at home, she talks to someone again. The TV or radio is on. A hearing girl learns new words all the time. And he learns them, assimilates the language, even if he doesn’t remember it later. A deaf child is deprived of all this.
While working on “Głusza” it turned out that the deaf also had problems with understanding what was going on during lessons in schools for the deaf, because some teachers signed poorly or not at all. One of the meetings around “Głusza” was attended by a young man who recalled speech therapy classes at a school for the deaf. The speech therapist put a wooden stick in his mouth so that the boy would learn to pronounce the letter “r”. He remembers that the speech therapist’s hands smelled of cigarettes and that he was crying. He also remembers the pain. He confessed that his speech therapist did not sign, so it was not entirely clear to the boy what these exercises were for.
Why didn’t the speech therapist blink?
The dispute over whether to talk to deaf children or to sign has been going on since the first schools for the deaf were established in the 18th century. Already at that time, there were educators who believed that deaf children should sign, representatives of the so-called of oralism, who argued that the deaf should be spoken to. Oralists’ views prevailed, and in the 19th century, sign languages slowly began to disappear from schools for the deaf. Children were forbidden to sign. Signing was supposed to interfere with learning to speak, and even – as some educators repeated – “make me lazy”, because children who started signing did not want to learn to talk.
Sign languages have gone underground. The deaf used them at home or in school dormitories, secretly. In the 1960s, Bogdan Szczepankowski, today a professor of humanities, a specialist in the field of surdopedagogy and surdologopedics, appeared in the Polish deaf community. He quickly realized that sign language was necessary to convey knowledge to deaf students. At that time, there was no research on the Polish sign language, so he developed a system that consists in speaking and signing at the same time. The teachers started to learn the words, but they flashed them keeping the grammar of the Polish language.
This sign language system helped the deaf in education?
Some say that it revolutionized education because it introduced sign language to schools, and others say that the appearance of SJM meant that the natural language of the deaf, PJM, was marginalized for the following years.
Another problem that teachers of schools for the deaf point to is the fact that the studies did not provide them with sufficient language skills. Teachers learned “sign language” and only in contact with deaf people did they find out that they sign differently. In college, they taught SJM, not PJM.
Today there are schools in Poland with bilingual teachers. Lessons are conducted in Polish or in PJM, depending on the needs of students. The deaf, however, call for systemic solutions, including the introduction of bilingual education, the assumptions of which, in a nutshell, consist in the fact that the child first learns a language that he can assimilate, i.e. PJM, and then Polish as a foreign language, mainly in the written version . He leaves school bilingual.
The report of the Supreme Audit Office published in mid-December “Education of the deaf and hearing impaired for reform” shows that still 60 percent. teachers in schools for the deaf do not speak Polish sign language fluently.
Is Polish Sign Language widely recognized now?
There is no doubt that it is a language like any other. Research on Polish sign language began in 1992 at the University of Warsaw, thanks to a meeting between Małgorzata Czajkowska-Kisil, a surdopedagogue, a teacher at the Institute of the Deaf, and prof. Marek Świdziński, a formal grammarian. In 2010, the Laboratory of Sign Linguistics was established, headed by prof. Paweł Rutkowski, student of prof. Świdziński.
If today there are voices depreciating Polish Sign Language, researchers can answer. One of the most common complaints is that PJM is a poor language. The lack of vocabulary in some areas, however, does not result from the limitations of the language, because there are none, but from its history. If school classes were not conducted in this language, it is not surprising that there may be a lack of specialist vocabulary. Prof. Marek Świdziński gives an example from the University of Warsaw – ever since deaf researchers appeared in the Laboratory of Sign Linguistics, there are already linguistic concepts in PJM. Lectures on Polish Sign Language can be conducted in this language.
How do deaf people find themselves in the labor market? Can they find a job that gives them satisfaction?
More and more deaf people study and work in professions that were previously unavailable to this group. Deaf people set up their own companies, are lecturers, scientists, artists, athletes. The problems on the labor market they talk about are related to education, as well as the still low awareness of what it means to be a deaf person.
Are employers afraid of hiring deaf people?
I do not know if they are afraid, I would rather say that as hearing people we know little about the communication barriers that deaf people will encounter and how to eliminate them. Hiring a deaf person does not always have to involve an interpreter – online or face-to-face, as some deaf people prefer written communication.
One of the job coaches told me about the workshops they prepare for employers planning to hire deaf people. A makeshift town is created, in which there are only deaf people and one hearing person, i.e. the employer. A hearing person must, for example, go to an interview with a deaf teacher, take a loan from a bank where only deaf people work, or talk to a deaf policeman who stopped him for a speed control. They have to settle all these matters in Polish sign language, which is a foreign language for hearing people. They suddenly understand how difficult it is.
* Anna Goc – reporter, collaborated with the Krakow editorial office of “Gazeta Wyborcza”, currently the editor of “Tygodnik Powszechny”. Laureate of the 6th edition of the Scholarship Competition. Ryszard Kapuściński, the Grand Prix of the Małopolska Journalists’ Award and the Krakow UNESCO City of Literature Award. Three times nominated for the Grand Press Award in the Press Reportage category. In 2022, she was awarded by Amnesty International Poland for her reports on the rights of g/deaf people. Author of the books “Boniecki. Rozmowy o życiu” (Znak, 2018) and the reportage book “Głusza” (Evidence, 2022), which was nominated for Empik’s Discoveries 2022 in the Literature category and was a finalist of the “Newsweek{ im. Teresa Torańska in the category of the best book published in 2022. Now it is in the finals of the Ryszard Kapuściński Award 2023.
Source: Gazeta
Bruce is a talented author and journalist with a passion for entertainment . He currently works as a writer at the 247 News Agency, where he has established himself as a respected voice in the industry.
