Library Research Paper Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Library Research Paper - Essay Example Instead of individual phonemes being connected to form the rudimentary parts of an out-loud language, sign language uses individual movements to create meaning. Nevertheless, the language itself is not merely a tool used by a particular community to express and communicate thoughts, emotions, and ideas to other people. A living object connects members of the deaf community across ethnographic boundaries, a range of diverse backgrounds, and a number of very different hearing loss disorders. In a rare look into the culture of deafness from a complex sociocultural perspective, anthropologists Richard J. Senghas and Leila Monaghan (2002) raised questions about community identity, language ideology, and cultural formation/maintenance, in an effort to learn about the kind of culture that deafness has produced within the last century. The researchers correctly identify deafness not merely as the absence of hearing, but as a community of many speakers with many different languages and cultur al practices. On a superficial level, the language of the deaf community reflects the nature of that community as one comprised of people who are inherently incapable of using the spoken word. Nevertheless, on a more fundamental level, the language of the deaf community reflects deafness as a matter of social construction, and that understanding the deaf language is instrumental to understanding the deaf community. Linguistic communities are collections of people who can and do communicate with one another using language. Deaf people, or members of the deaf community, participate in these linguistic communities through a fully-formed language that bears the hallmarks of all natural languages, as identified in Stokoe’s (1980) and Washabaugh’s (1981) surveys. The participation in a linguistic community means that the anthropological, sociological, and linguistic study of the deaf