History of NZSL

After a 150 year struggle for recognition, within the last decade Sign Language has become an accepted and integral part of everyday New Zealand life.

Sign Language has in fact been around since the beginning of time. In 340 BC Socrates is reported to have said to his students, "If we could not speak, we would talk with our hands, head and other parts of the body, like deaf people".

Sign language was first taught in New Zealand in the 1870s. Miss Dorcas Mitchell came here with the Rev. R.R. Bradley and his family as a tutor to his deaf children. She had taught British Sign Language for six years at a school for the Deaf in London

At a conference - of hearing teachers - on the education of the Deaf held in Milan in 1880, it was decided that the oral method must be used in all schools around the world.

Thus, in 1880 when the Sumner School for the Deaf opened near Christchurch, the principal, Geritt van Asch, used a new German method for teaching deaf children to speak.

Dorcas Mitchell applied for the job as principal but was not appointed. The use of signs was banned and remained so until late in the 20th Century. Children who used sign language were often punished for it. The focus was on learning spoken language.

Dissuading Deaf children from using sign language was not a callous decision from a select few. Educators for the Deaf believed that if Deaf children learnt to speak, they would fit in more easily into society. Many teachers for the Deaf and doctors told parents that this was what was best for their child. As sign language was not widely visible in society, this was easily accepted. Teaching a deaf child to speak would make them "normal".

As a result many Deaf children were poorly educated.

NZSL's early beginnings

Despite the prohibition on signs, many Deaf kids used "home" signs and developed "school" signs to secretly communicate with each other. Home signs are those that develop naturally in a family with a Deaf person. This was probably the earliest beginnings of New Zealand Sign Language

Between 1880 and 1920 some children were sent to Deaf schools in Melbourne, where British Sign Language was taught. When they returned home they brought sign language back with them and this spread to other Deaf people.

The Sumner School employed some Deaf people as cleaners, cooks and gardeners etc. They used sign language and the children saw this and, despite the teachers' opposition, learned some sign language. In this way signs were passed from one generation to another.

In 1942, the Titirangi School for the Deaf in Auckland opened. The children boarding there developed a dialect of signs different to those in use at Sumner.

St Dominics School for the Deaf in <> opened in 1944. Some of the nuns were Deaf and used a dialect of Irish/Australian signs.

All of these strands are important to the development of NZSL, as with any stand-alone unique language, it is the sum of many linguistic parts.

Sign Language recognised at last

In the 1960s, William Stokoe, a hearing professor at Gallaudet University in the USA (the only university in the world for Deaf people), studied the linguistics of American Sign Language (ASL). He was the first hearing person to say that sign language is a full human language.

It was around this time, too, that NZ Deaf people began to speak out about the need for signing to be taught in Deaf schools.

Within a decade, teachers realised that deaf children with deaf parents learned faster and therefore that sign language was useful for learning.

Total Communication (TC) is an approach to deaf education that aims to make use of a number of modes of communication such as signs, oral, auditory, written and visual aids.

An American psychologist in New Zealand challenged the oral education tradition here and encouraged parents and teachers to start TC in New Zealand Deaf education.

TC was adopted quickly in UK and Australia. It was supposed to be a middle ground in age-old disputes between oralism and natural sign language. But it failed dismally because it was a signed system constructed by hearing people with signs for each word in the English language. It did not follow the natural grammar rules of NZSL

An Australasian Signed English system, based on Australian (Victorian) signs was developed by collaboration between teachers from both Australia and New Zealand

Peter Ballingall, a teacher of the Deaf at Kelston, in 1972 studied the signing of New Zealand Deaf children and found 600 signs. He concluded that this was a natural language.

By 1979, TC and Australasian Signed English had become official policy for teaching Deaf children but in 1989 the Deaf Association adopted NZSL as the official sign language for this country. NZSL described and documented

In that year there was another major step forward - Marianne Collins-Ahlgren, a visiting American scholar working at Victoria University of Wellington, completed a thesis entitled "Aspects of NZSL", which was the first full description of NZSL grammar.

The following year, 1990, work began at Victoria on a dictionary of NZSL.

Through the first half of the 1990s the NZSL movement gathered momentum and by 1995, NZSL was formally accepted in education for the first time in 105 years. Deaf children were now able to use their natural language in the classroom. By the 1996 Census there were 26,000 people who used the language, which was by now a fully integrated part of New Zealand culture."

That fact was formally recognised when the New Zealand Sign Language Act 2006 was passed, making NZSL the country's third official language - along with English and Maori. For the Deaf community, this was the culmination of a 150 year struggle to have sign language used and recognised as an essential part of New Zealand everyday life.