Deaf Culture

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Recommended: The relationship between language and culture

Language couldn’t exist without culture. They are interlinked with each other. It is human nature to be bonded to a society through the means of culture. The ethics and morals of a society are preserved by language. Its knowledge, history, and customs, its beliefs and its values, its arts, music, and stories resemble the embodiment of culture within a community. It is preserved by the language. Language provides a cultural identity, a name, a culture for those who belong to in a society. Language plays an essential part in culture, it creates a pathway of communication within the population and gives the people something to relate to thus creating the culture itself. Without language is without culture, without culture is without the fundamental essence of nature. …show more content…

Many people within the Deaf community uses sign language. As each country has its own version of signing, Deaf people vary differently in each part of the world. Though within its own differences, the Deaf community holds similar values through the means of their language and values. Sign language is a complex language and it is a masterpiece created for the Deaf. As sign language is a visual/gestural language and its lack of a writing system, these features pushed the language in the shadows of other spoken languages. It wasn’t until about 50 years ago however, iconicity plays a more important part in this language than in spoken languages. In the same manners as any other spoken language, to compose a well-formed sentence in sign language, the signer must follow a certain set of punctuation and grammar rules. An example for this is the space in front of the signer part in visual languages like in ASL, to form a proper question, eyebrows placements could change a who-what-when-where-why question to a yes-no

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