Sign Language in Everyday Life

Deaf people across many parts of the world recount stories of ‘surviving’ their education because of the lack of access to the curriculum via a sign language on the one hand, and on the other, because of the intense suppression of sign languages that existed for many decades in many countries. Indeed, in many places, this remains the status quo today. In the quote that opens this chapter, we have access to the views of Helga Stevens, who in 2014 became the first deaf woman to be elected to the European Parliament. She is also a lawyer who has served as Executive Director and, later, President of the European Union of the Deaf (EUD), and as a parliamentarian and a senator in Flanders, Belgium. As a sign language user, it is clear that she is pushing the boundaries for ever-increasing recognition and use of sign languages across the gamut of human interaction. Indeed, she was the central public figure behind the move to have Flemish Sign Language legally recognised in Flanders in 2006 (Wheatley & Pabsch, 2010). In this chapter, our focus is on where and how deaf people use sign languages in everyday life and for what purposes, with concentration in the latter part of the chapter on various institutional contexts where people communicate directly in sign language or indirectly through mediated interpretation. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.