ABSTRACT
For almost 20 years, I have been researching Britain's Deaf community, with a significant proportion of that work involving collecting what might be considered as ‘oral history’ or ‘oral testimony’. In doing so, I have faced a number of practical and ethical issues that make aspects of this approach significantly different from similar speech-based data collection exercises. The very concept of gathering “oral histories” from Deaf people gives rise to some interesting issues, most notably of which is the reference of signed language as ‘oral: Can testimony provided in sign language – ‘signed’ testimony – be considered ‘oral’ testimony, as it is clearly not a ‘verbally’ spoken language and therefore cannot be ‘oral’? However, sign language is the only practical alternative to spoken language for a significant proportion of the Deaf population in any country. Recent data from the UK government suggests as many as 180,000 Britons use British Sign Language (BSL) as their first or preferred language (Department of Health, 2011). For many of these people, spoken language is not a viable communication option, and so signed testimony acts in precisely the same way as oral testimony for those who speak. The argument put forward here is that much of what is considered as oral testimony is not available in any other form, as it is not been written down or recorded elsewhere. This is certainly true of the Deaf community, as there is no written form of any sign language, other than extremely complex and specialist linguistic notation systems that have been devised for research and analysis purposes (Hopkins, 2008). Therefore I contend that the concept of oral testimony and oral history is not confined simply to spoken language, but can be equally applied to signed communication. Signed testimony may not come from Deaf people's voices, but they speak with their hands instead and so what is signed is just as valid as the more traditional interpretation of oral testimony.
