In 2013, at a conference on endangered languages, a retired teacher named Linda Lambrecht announced the extraordinary discovery of a previously unknown language. Lambrecht – who is Chinese-Hawaiian, 71 years old, warm but no-nonsense – called it Hawaii Sign Language, or HSL. In front of a room full of linguists, she demonstrated that its core vocabulary – words such as “mother”, “pig” and “small” – was distinct from that of other sign languages.

The linguists were immediately convinced. William O’Grady, the chair of the linguistics department at the University of Hawaii, called it “the first time in 80 years that a new language has been discovered in the United States — and maybe the last time.” But the new language found 80 years ago was in remote Alaska, whereas HSL was hiding in plain sight in Honolulu, a metropolitan area of nearly a million people. It was the kind of discovery that made the world seem larger.

The last-minute arrival of recognition and support for HSL was a powerful, almost surreal vindication for Lambrecht, whose first language is HSL. For decades, it was stigmatised or ignored; now the language has acquired an agreed-upon name, an official “language code” from the International Organization for Standardization, the attention of linguists around the world, and a three-year grant from the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.

The race to save a dying language – podcast Read more

But just as linguists were substantiating its existence, HSL stood on the brink of extinction, remembered by just a handful of signers. Unless the language made a miraculous recovery, Lambrecht feared that her announcement might turn out to be HSL’s obituary.

Three years after announcing its existence, Lambrecht is still unearthing her language sign by sign. She may be the only person in the world who still uses HSL on a regular basis, signing into a camera while a linguist named James “Woody” Woodward and a handful of graduate students from the University of Hawaii document her every move.

Led by Lambrecht, Woodward, and researcher Barbara Earth, the project aims to document what may be the last-ever conversations of native HSL signers. The goal is to record at least 20 hours of high-quality video footage of natural HSL and then transcribe, translate, and archive it. The researchers hope that this work – along with a series of illustrated handbooks depicting over 1,000 signs, and a regular class at the University of Hawaii set to begin next year – will jump-start the revitalisation of HSL.

The project faces numerous obstacles. The first is the scepticism of many of the remaining signers themselves. Hawaii’s tiny Deaf community is deeply divided. Some say HSL is not a real language, others see it as backward; still others are sceptical of Lambrecht.

Illustration by Christian Montenegro

But the gravest threat to HSL is American Sign Language (ASL), which is advancing across the globe – from Hawaii to Thailand to Togo – just as fast as English. The Deaf world, intensely local until recently, is consolidating and globalising in unprecedented ways. And the forward march of ASL, which in certain ways brings people together, also poses a significant danger to many of the estimated 400 sign languages used all over the world – most of which we know nothing about.

Hawaii is a bellwether, but Deaf culture all around the world – for many on the inside it is a “capital-D” culture, not a “lower-case-d” disability – faces threats from every direction. The “mainstreaming” of deaf students means that they are placed in hearing schools, where they are encouraged to be just like everyone else but with “special needs”, in a process that some call deliberate assimilation. Cochlear implants (and the potential of gene therapy) even more fundamentally endanger sign languages – some Deaf activists condemn such “cures” as being akin to genocide.

If the loss of a particular language such as HSL means the end of a whole expressive system, the disappearance of sign language in general – the only fully fledged form of language completely independent of speech – would permanently impoverish human communication.

Like every natural language, HSL is the evolved product of a specific history, the unconscious creation of a community. For it to survive, local signers will have to make a deliberate choice to use it. The same may be increasingly true of Deafness itself. The story of HSL raises crucial questions in an age of globalisation: Do cultures on the margins have a future? Will enough people choose to be that different, and will they do it together?

Though they parallel spoken languages in certain ways, sign languages represent a fundamentally different way of communicating. They neither derive from, nor correspond to, spoken languages. Nor are all sign languages mutually intelligible, as hearing people often assume – they are as various as spoken languages.

Their historical evolution is distinctive. Infants can sign before they can speak, and the great sign language linguist William Stokoe argued that sign may have preceded speech in the history of human language. It’s considered normal for one in 1,000 children to be born profoundly deaf, but places with higher rates of inherited deafness – such as the village of al-Sayyid in Israel and Bengkala in Bali – have been natural hotspots for sign languages.

For sign languages, and for Deaf culture more broadly, intergenerational transmission is far from straightforward. The vast majority of deaf adults give birth to hearing children, while most deaf children are born to hearing adults who have no connection with the Deaf communities.

Signing is not miming, and signs are not just gestures that anyone can immediately grasp

Signing is not miming, and signs are not “just” gestures that anyone can immediately grasp. “Iconic” signs, where the gesture self-evidently expresses meaning, play a role in every sign language, but even they can be wonderfully nuanced. In HSL, for instance, “cry” is signed with spread-finger “tears” running out from the sides of the eyes, while “bawl” has the fingers running straight down. Still, abstraction and convention are essential, just as in speech, because not everything can be expressed with self-evident gestures. There is nothing obvious, for example, about the HSL sign for “man” or “boy”: a spread hand moving down across the head.

For most of recorded history, sign languages have been effectively invisible to hearing people. It was not until William Stokoe’s groundbreaking study of ASL, published in 1960, that any sign language had been analysed as a fully fledged communication system with a grammar of its own. In 1965 Stokoe published an ASL dictionary, also the first of its kind.

Now that the kind of geographical isolation that once bred new languages is no more, sign languages represent something of a final frontier. “We really don’t know how many sign languages there are,” says Albert Bickford of the global sign languages team at the language database Ethnologue. “It seems reasonable to assume that the majority of sign languages currently in use in the world have not been discovered yet,” Victoria Nyst, a linguist at Leiden University, told me.

The most recent edition of Ethnologue, published earlier this year, mentions 141 sign languages. Over a hundred more have been reported, Bickford says, but no solid information on them exists – just the barest indication that Deaf people may sign differently in a particular place. We may never know much about these languages, or even confirm their existence.

Lambrecht’s announcement in 2013 was the culmination of a lifetime of work. Born deaf, she hears almost nothing, barely even the noise of a siren blaring in her street. “I grew up very frustrated, thinking I’m not deaf, I’m not deaf, I’m hearing! I want to be an actress, I want to be a dancer, I want to be a movie star!” Lambrecht told me late last year at the University of Hawaii. “I was so frustrated that I couldn’t be those things.”

Teletype, an early form of texting, and closed captioning, which made TV and films accessible, were life-changing developments for her when they became widespread in the 1970s. “After that, I settled down,” she said. “I hated being deaf until that communication barrier broke down, when all those devices came out.”

The youngest of seven children, Lambrecht started signing HSL at home in the late 1940s – learning it from two of her older brothers, who were both deaf like her. She was probably one of the last people anywhere to learn HSL naturally, as a first language, and picking it up from family was particularly unusual. By then, the dorm at Hawaii’s only deaf school was the closest thing HSL had to a homeland – it was there that one of her brothers learned it.

But ASL was already coming in. Soon after the second world war, an unprecedented number of Deaf mainlanders came to Hawaii to work or retire. Within a few decades, ASL was dominant, HSL almost dormant. “We would get a lot of insults, a lot of negativity,” Lambrecht recalled. “Deaf people here would put themselves into an inferior category compared to the people who brought ASL. People said, ‘They’re from America, they’re white people, they know better.’”

Lambrecht made a living by teaching ASL for 33 years, mostly to hearing people, but in her spare time she pursued HSL, tracking down old signers in hospitals and nursing homes. “We used to go to the other islands to drum up people, and now they’re all dead, dead, dead,” her husband, Jeff, said. Interested mainlanders had documented a small number of local signs, and they encouraged Lambrecht to do more. Years in, she realised she had been collecting the remains of a complete and original language.

Without funding and without linguistic expertise, Lambrecht’s efforts stalled until 2007, when a woman named Barbara Earth came to Hawaii and enrolled in her ASL class. After a career working on gender and development in Asia and Africa, Earth was going deaf and wanted to learn how to sign.

Embracing Lambrecht’s cause and digging into HSL history, Earth hunted for money to support the project. Three years later, she found enough for a pilot study, interviewing 19 elderly Deaf people and two children of Deaf adults on four Hawaiian islands. William O’Grady, the linguistics department chair at the University of Hawaii, agreed to host the project at the university: “Barbara knocked on my door and said there was an unknown sign language here in Hawaii, and she needed help to prove that it existed.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Linda Lambrecht, left, teaches Hawaii Sign Language. Photograph: Eugene Tanner Photography, LLC

An initial estimate of up to 280 surviving HSL signers was soon revised down to 40, then down to just 10 or so old-timers still likely to be competent in HSL. ASL had made deep inroads even among these signers, but there was evidence, especially from Lambrecht’s signs, that HSL was distinct, and lay close enough to the surface to be recovered. Spoken languages such as Basque, Welsh, and Hawaiian have come back from the brink of extinction – could HSL be the first sign language to do it?

For James Woodward, the mass extinction of sign languages is bound up in prejudice and chauvinism. He believes that every local sign language should have the chance to become a valued, modernised language of education, giving communities a choice and a chance at continuity. Like the spread of English, the triumph of ASL might enable communication, but convenience cannot replace intimacy and history, which people soon forget ever existed.

Signs of the times: deaf community minds its language Read more

One day late last year in Honolulu, I sat in on a gathering that included some of the last active HSL signers. Besides Lambrecht, there were the three other elderly signers who had joined the project within the last year. Their funny and furious signing was almost all in ASL, as usual, but here and there old bits of HSL were surfacing.

“Is this Deaf culture or what!?” Hilda Lopez signed. “I love it, I love it, I love it.” She kissed her own hands as she signed. “HSL is really number one in my life. The ones who don’t like it are small-minded!”

Lopez explained to me that her first name in English is Hilda, but her name sign – her real, everyday name in the Deaf community – is a pointing gesture towards the mouth, based on an incident at her fifth birthday party when someone fired a BB gun and shot out some of her teeth. It’s a classic HSL name sign: blunt, comic and personal, based on physical characteristics and memorable incidents.

Like any language, HSL can be broken down by linguists, but its personality, its characteristic style of discourse, is harder to get a handle on. Even when signing ASL, Lopez seems to embody the HSL style. “When they’re using ASL, people talk too long and make other people bored,” she told me. “HSL is short and thrilling and fast.”

HSL has a bigger 'signing space' than ASL – anywhere from the top of the head to the bottom of the torso

HSL has a bigger “signing space” than ASL – meaningful signs can be made anywhere from the top of the head to the bottom of the torso. Signs that occur not on the hands but elsewhere on the body also play an important role. “Kick” is signed only with the leg, for instance, while a raised eyebrow is a vital bit of grammar, signalling a yes or no question, or a conditional clause beginning with “if”. The “vocalisations” accompanying certain signs, which fellow signers can sometimes lip-read, echo different spoken languages: borrowed words from Hawaiian, English and Hawaii Pidgin.

Lopez thinks and talks to herself in sign. “I’m 100% Deaf!” she said proudly. “I don’t hear sound, but I can feel it, I feel the body vibrations in my chest: bass drums, police sirens. The only thing I can hear is fireworks — I don’t like the smell of them, they make me sick, but I like the noise and vibration.”

Lopez never knew her biological parents, but she is fiercely proud of her Native Hawaiian and mixed-ethnic roots. At least one piece of evidence, an 1821 letter discovered by Barbara Earth, seems to link HSL to the Native Hawaiian past. In that year, an American missionary, newly arrived in the Kingdom of Hawaii, met a deaf man and bargained with him over 40 sticks of firewood and a pig. Some of the man’s signs were “in common use”, seemingly among both deaf and hearing people, wrote the missionary. The signs he recorded for “pig”, “money”, “see”, and a system of counting by clapping, are still present in HSL today.

The rate of inherited deafness in Hawaii is normal. But by the late 19th century, waves of Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese and Filipino immigrants were coming to Hawaii to work on the American-run plantations, and a new multi-racial Deaf community took shape in Honolulu, including boot shiners, launderers, and flower sellers. There was even what a contemporary newspaper called a “fancy deaf wedding”, where 80 of the guests used “the sign language”.

“The turning point, the beginning of the end of HSL,” according to Barbara Earth, was the founding of Hawaii’s deaf school in 1914. Like most schools at the time, it promoted oralism, the system of lip-reading and speaking that is almost universally despised in Deaf communities for being painful, unnatural and ineffective. But for a while the school was also a unique environment for the clandestine transmission of HSL. One former student, Norman Galapin, told me that he learned HSL “on the playgrounds and in the dorm”, though “if the teacher saw you signing, sometimes they would slap your hands, or hit you with a ruler, or pinch your cheek.”

During the 1940s, HSL was already a language in transition, according to Galapin: “They weren’t using the old [HSL] sign for ‘mother’, they were using this [ASL] one, but they were still using the old sign for ‘father’.” Starting in 1939, a few charismatic teachers from the mainland played a vital role in overturning oralism and legitimising sign language, but they ended up promoting ASL over HSL in the process.

Employment, education and access to government services – from court interpreters to mental health provision in sign language – were perennial problems in the community, but many deaf Hawaiians thrived as master carpenters, printers, mechanics, postal workers and even ukulele makers. As elsewhere, an informal Deaf Club was at the centre of an unusually tightknit community, organising Christmas parties, bowling nights and an annual summer camp-out on the beach, with up to 100 people fishing and cooking for two weeks straight.

Yet Hilda Lopez, like many Deaf Hawaiians, left Hawaii for the mainland for education and for work, arriving in California in her teens. The culture shock was intense: “It was all ASL, and I wasn’t really comfortable with it,” she said. “People seemed to know so much, I felt that I wasn’t very smart…. I got confused and I lost HSL, I didn’t really remember it any more.” Only now, haltingly peeling away the layers of ASL, is she starting to reclaim the language.

No other sign language comes close to having the influence of ASL. Accurate, up-to-date signer numbers do not exist for any sign language, but most of the larger ones are not even yet secure in their own countries. There are more than 20 million deaf people in China, for instance, but Chinese Sign Language, which has hardly been documented, has only been acknowledged as a distinct language for the last 30 years.

By comparison, ASL is a powerhouse, supported and promoted by institutions such as the National Association of the Deaf, and Gallaudet University in Washington DC, which describes itself as “the world’s only university with programmes and services specifically designed to accommodate deaf and hard of hearing students”. Gallaudet plays a critical role in the American Deaf community and in the life of ASL. Until recently, the university supported both a college prep centre in Honolulu (to ensure qualified deaf applicants to Gallaudet) and ASL interpreter training in Hawaii (to bolster ASL more broadly).

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Linda Lambrecht having a conversation in Hawaii Sign Language, Honolulu. Photograph: Eugene Tanner Photography, LLC

ASL may now be going global, but the language is at least partly rooted in local sign languages that have long since gone extinct. French Sign Language was the first modern, “methodical” sign language, codified in the 1760s and 70s for formal instruction from existing signs used in the Deaf community of Paris by the Abbé Charles-Michel de l’Épée. When America’s first school for the deaf opened in Hartford, Connecticut in 1817, French Sign Language was imported and likely fused with a handful of existing New England sign languages. The result was ASL. (British Sign Language, dominant in the UK but only granted official status in 2003, is not directly related to ASL.)

Today, there are at least 500,000 ASL signers in the US, while ASL and ASL-derived sign languages are also widespread across the Caribbean, the Pacific and much of Africa and south-east Asia. The language’s increasing dominance in countries on every continent reflects the strength of Deaf culture in America and the role that well-meaning American missionaries and educators have played in spreading Deaf education through ASL.

In the past, James Woodward told me, missionaries would often tell deaf people in other countries that they didn’t have a language. “It’s improving now,” he added, “but I saw that going on as late as 1999 in Thailand, when some Americans came over. I think there’s a growing awareness in the Deaf community in the US of how ASL has really endangered many other sign languages, and even destroyed some.”

As with English, prestige plays a major role in the growth of ASL. The linguist Victoria Nyst has written that “signers in West Africa tend to perceive ASL-based sign languages as being superior to sign languages of local origin.” Similarly, Misella Tomita, a young Gallaudet graduate from Hawaii, described visiting the Netherlands and seeing everyone using ASL rather than Dutch Sign Language: “I felt like ASL is taking over the world.” Closer to home, Woodward has studied Black ASL, which seems to have evolved in the second half of the 19th century at segregated deaf schools in the southern US. The dialect, which is an inspiration to Lambrecht, carries a heavy stigma and has become highly endangered. Almost all black signers now use standard ASL.

At the Hawaii School for the Deaf and Blind, ASL became the standard in 1960. Today, more than half the teachers are Deaf and students are expected to sign ASL while learning to read and write English. HSL is only used, occasionally, by one dedicated teacher, and Linda’s proposal to teach the language there was turned down.

“I think ASL is the reason for the decline of HSL,” Woodward told me matter-of-factly, but then added: “You can’t really separate the personal issues from the linguistic issues.”

The impending disappearance of a language puts enormous stress on a community. For years, the last two fluent speakers of Ayapaneco in Mexico were not on speaking terms, until outside pressures and incentives convinced them to reconcile. According to William O’Grady, one language with just 60 speakers has four competing writing systems. In any community that speaks an endangered language, there are often groups who think the language is not worth saving. “But usually when it’s too late, there’s a deep sense of regret,” O’Grady said.

In Hawaii, the remaining community of HSL signers is deeply divided. Lambrecht is the face of the language, but as a past president of the Aloha State Association of the Deaf (ASAD), she is on the opposite “side” from many of the older signers, who belong to a group known as the Diamond Head School Alumni (after the former name of the deaf school).

The impending disappearance of a language puts stress on a community. The remaining HSL speakers are deeply divided

The two organisations are the institutional expression of a seemingly intractable split in the Deaf community that dates back to at least the 1970s. Some explain it as generational, historical and linguistic, but it is also personal, visceral and mysteriously self-perpetuating. In 2014, when the deaf school marked its 100th anniversary, there were two separate celebrations: one for the Diamond Head group, one for the group Lambrecht is a part of. “I feel like it’s just natural now, this fighting,” Lopez told me.

Because HSL was in retreat by the 1950s, most younger Deaf people can hardly sign in the language – there was virtually nowhere for them to pick it up. Many take great pride in their identity as Deaf Hawaiians and emphatically support HSL as a symbol of that identity. But some of the most fluent of the older HSL signers, in the Diamond Head group, are deeply ambivalent about reviving the language. “Even though they use it in their conversations, they don’t feel that HSL is a real language,” said Darlene Ewan, a community activist who teaches at the deaf school.

Early on, Wanda Andrew, who is part of the Diamond Head group, warned off the researchers: “I said, ‘To tell you the truth, for HSL it’s too late, it’s dead,’” she told me. “The loss of HSL is sad, but it was just sort of a mixture of everything, like chop suey, just kind of like an accent.” For Andrew, who is in her 70s, ASL enabled a cosmopolitan life, from studies at Gallaudet to decades on the mainland and eventual marriage to a Deaf Australian man.

Explaining why some keep their distance from the project, Andrew added that “People will just say they don’t want to, because they don’t want to work with Linda.” She continued, “And if they don’t remember [signs], then they just don’t remember [them]. Or they might be afraid of what it’s for, or they don’t want to feel dumb… I don’t support Linda, I think she’s a little narcissistic.”

Others close to the Diamond Head group agreed that personal animosity and questions of authority – whose signs to record and revitalise? – are part of the problem. Lambrecht’s supporters counter that she has almost single-handedly led the revitalisation effort. Lambrecht herself points to the lingering power of the stigma: “HSL is in their hearts, but they’re resistant. They want to be modern.”

The divide, which has implications for how the language is documented, is now reflected in a similar rift between the researchers. Earth and Woodward now acknowledge that ASL must have had a deeper impact than was initially understood, obliterating HSL and leaving in its place a hybrid of ASL and HSL that Woodward calls CHSL (Creolised HSL).

Earth believes that when signers refer to HSL today, they may actually mean CHSL – a view Woodward does not share.After meeting more members of the Diamond Head group, Earth argues that CHSL is the only thing left: “I have never seen pure HSL. Fewer and fewer old folks retain strong HSL elements… They cannot recover pure HSL because they never knew it.” Woodward counters that “the past two years have shown that Lambrecht is using a different language from CHSL” – during recording sessions where Earth, increasingly estranged from the project, was not present.

The signs for “blue”, “green” and “yellow” have become a particular flashpoint in this dispute. Woodward argues that Lambrecht’s distinctive signs for these colour terms make semantic sense, because they are clearly related to the HSL signs for “water”, “bamboo” and “pineapple”. But other signers were incredulous, saying they had never seen the signs before and suggesting that they might be specific to Lambrecht or her family. Their own signs for those colours were basically ASL, and they couldn’t remember any others that might be original to HSL. Earth felt that the pressure to find such “original” non-ASL signs risked distorting the research.

“If no other person has a sign and Linda has a sign, I don’t know what else to do except use her sign,” said Woodward, who worked with the last known signer of Chiang Mai Sign Language in northern Thailand before he died of complications from diabetes in early 2015. Lambrecht’s signs for “blue”, “green”, and “yellow” are likely to be the standard for teaching HSL going forward. “If there’s only one person left,” Woodward said, “then that’s what you have to document.”

Now in its final month, the three-year project to document and revitalise HSL has made progress, but the hardest work remains ahead. “We haven’t been able to do everything we wanted,” Woodward told me recently. He is applying to the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme for a six-month grant extension. Even now, he said, the team is still finding new signs.

While she continues her work with Woodward, Lambrecht is looking beyond Hawaii, since ASL is spreading to other islands across the Pacific: “I want to tell people there: it’s not that you’re stuck with your local sign language, you can borrow signs from ASL, but please don’t throw out your local language.” Woodward believes that many of the Pacific’s innumerable islands had, or may still have, traditional, indigenous sign languages of their own – he has already identified one on Majuro, one of the Marshall Islands.

“Time is passing quickly,” Lambrecht said the last time I talked to her. The oldest signer who had joined the project, a Japanese-Hawaiian woman named Mildred, was dying. “I remember Mildred would always tell me, ‘I don’t like HSL, I like ASL, it’s for educated people like me,’ and I would say, ‘No, no, no, it’s our local language!’” Mildred was seen as one of HSL’s remaining masters, but she had been reluctant to sign for the camera when I visited last year.

Then in February, Linda told me, Mildred had a bad fall and went to the hospital. She couldn’t walk and was now under hospice care, living with her son. Linda visited her recently: “I saw her signing – and I noticed that she had reverted to HSL. We were just shocked. The others didn’t understand her, I said let me translate. Now when I visit her I try to catch every story I can, while she’s still here. Next time I go I really want to bring the camera and record her.”

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