New Zealand Sign Language - History

History

The first non-Polynesian immigrants to New Zealand were from Britain, and those who were deaf brought British Sign Language with them. The first known teacher of sign language was Dorcas Mitchell, who taught the children of one family in Charteris Bay, Lyttelton Harbour, from 1868 to 1877. By 1877 she had taught 42 pupils.

When the first school for the deaf (then called the Sumner Deaf and Dumb Institution) was opened at Sumner, south east of Christchurch in 1878, Mitchell applied unsuccessfully for the position of principal. Instead it went to Gerrit Van Asch, who agreed with the Milan congress of deaf educators of 1880 (to which no deaf people were invited) that teaching should be oral only, and that sign language should be forbidden. (He would not even admit pupils who could sign, so only 14 were admitted.) This was the policy of the school until 1979. A documentary film about the school made in the 1950s makes no mention of sign language. Similar policies were maintained at the schools at Titirangi and Kelston that opened in 1940 and 1958.

Unsurprisingly, the children used sign language secretly and after leaving school, developing NZSL out of British Sign Language largely without adult intervention for over 100 years. The main haven for NZSL was the Deaf Clubs in the main centres. In 1979, "Total Communication" (a "use anything that works" philosophy) was adopted at the Sumner School, but the signing it used was "Australasian Sign Language" an artificial signed form of English. As a result, younger signers use a number of Australasian signs in their NZSL, to such an extent that some call traditional NZSL "Old Sign". NZSL was adopted for teaching in 1994.

In 1985, Marianne Ahlgren proved in her PhD thesis at Victoria University of Wellington that NZSL is a fully-fledged language, with a large vocabulary of signs and a consistent grammar of space.

The New Zealand Sign Language Teachers Association (NZSLTA - formerly known as the New Zealand Sign Language Tutors Association) was set up in 1992. Over the next few years adult education classes in NZSL began in several centres. In 1997 a Certificate in Deaf Studies programme was started at Victoria University of Wellington, with instruction actually in NZSL, designed to teach deaf people how to competently teach NZSL to the wider public. Also in 1992 an interpreter training programme was established at the Auckland Institute of Technology, now known as AUT University; this programme was first directed and taught by Dr Rachel Locker McKee (hearing) and Dr David McKee (deaf) and came about due to lobbying by the New Zealand Deaf Community and others who recognised the need for safer and more professional interpreting services; they had as early as 1984 sought support for more research to determine the need for sign language interpreters. Other than a one-off course run in 1985, this was the first time a professional training programme with a qualification was offered in New Zealand. Many of those who have gone on to work as professional NZSL interpreters began their journey in NZSL community classes taught by members of the NZSLTA.

An important step toward the recognition of NZSL was the publication in 1998 of a comprehensive NZSL dictionary by Victoria University of Wellington and the Deaf Association of NZ. It contains some 4000 signs (which correspond to many more meanings than the same number of English words, because of the way signs can be modulated in space and time), sorted by handshape, not English meaning, and coded in the Hamburg Notational System, HamNoSys, as well as pictorially. In 2011, Victoria University launched an Online Dictionary of New Zealand Sign Language based on the original 1998 work, which includes video clips of each sign with examples and the ability to search for signs based on features of the sign (handshape, location, etc.) as well as the sign's English gloss.

For some years, TVNZ broadcast a weekly news programme, "News Review", interpreted in NZSL. This was discontinued in 1993 after a joint survey of deaf and hearing-impaired people found a majority favoured captioned programmes. Many deaf people felt they had been misled by the survey. There has been no regular programming in NZSL since.