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Ideological framing of sign languages and their users in the South African press

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Published/Copyright: April 29, 2024

Abstract

This exploratory study provides an overview of prominent themes pertaining to portrayals of sign languages (SLs) and Deaf people in the South African press (2011–2019), as well as an analysis of a subset of articles to illustrate the discursive constructions of each of the prominent ideological framings. The findings of the paper suggest that many ways of representing South African Sign Language (SASL) and their users align with international trends. The two most prominent ideological framings are the medical/disability model and the linguistic minority model. Within the medical model, SLs are seen as inferior means of communication used by a disabled minority. Within the linguistic minority framework SLs are regarded as natural, legitimate languages deserving equal status to spoken languages. The paper also identifies an ideological framing that is not predicted by the international literature, coined here as ‘diversity tokenism’. Diversity tokenism is when SL is mentioned only to increase perceived diversity, where diversity is a commodity that holds social capital. This portrayal of SASL seems to be increasing and holds a warning: although SASL users have received official recognition and rights through the recent declaration of SASL as an official language, it might not be the end of the battle to ensure that users of SASL can live out their linguistic citizenship.


Corresponding author: Marcelyn Oostendorp, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa, E-mail:

Abstract in SASL available at https://youtu.be/t6R7Qr0c_MQ


Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Modiegi Njeyiyana for the SASL translation of the abstract and Kate Huddlestone for the editing of the video. We would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers and the editor for their comments on this paper. All mistakes that remain are our own.

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Received: 2023-03-17
Accepted: 2024-04-15
Published Online: 2024-04-29
Published in Print: 2024-07-26

© 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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