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Signed Away

Against the commodification of deaf communication

In the best episode of The Simpsons, two neighboring factions of children have declared war, and Springfieldians Bart and Millhouse are deep in enemy territory, camped out on a hill overlooking their Shelbyville rivals. Through a spyglass, Bart watches them speak and despairs that he can’t make out their plan. “I thought you said you could read lips,” groans Millhouse. Bart’s priceless reply is, “I assumed I could!” Whether it be the magical powers of lipreading or the complexities of signed language, hearing people have a lot of assumptions when it comes to communicating in the absence of sound. Some, like Bart, wrongly assume that lipreading skills are inherent or effective. Others believe signed languages are similarly intuitive, universal, or simplified transliterations of speech; in reality, they are as motley, multiple, and subject to vagaries of context as any spoken tongue from the King’s English to Dravidian morphology.

Over three hundred signed languages exist across the world, each with its own grammar, syntax, vocabulary, and aesthetic that can be inscrutable to the quiet-challenged. Just as spoken languages evolve according to the necessities of a given group, a signed language develops organically within a given deaf populace and reflects that community’s era and expectations. It’s why the signs for “man” and “woman” in American Sign Language (ASL) stem from 1800s-style references to newsboy caps and bonnet strings, while British Sign Language (BSL) evokes the tugging of a beard and brushing of the shoulder (which, incidentally, look very close to the ASL for “old” and “young”). Meanwhile, Croatian Sign Language visualizes a mustache and earrings, and so forth.

Even within a single signed language, nuance is difficult for outsiders to discern, with subtle differences in a sign’s handshape, movement, or repetitions drastically changing meaning just as the addition or subtraction of a syllable from a spoken word might. Enter every ASL 101 student telling their professor they are “horny” instead of “hungry” or that they want to “make out” when they mean they want “coffee.” Under the guidance of a fluent deaf teacher, students can be taught to parse out a signed language’s unique patterns. But when signed language is taken out of deaf people’s hands and twisted in hearing people’s—especially those with ulterior motives—nuance, cultural competence, and at times even basic meaning are lost.

Lend Me Your Ears

Deaf people are no strangers to having their culture and language appropriated by the likes of academic and cultural institutions. In the United States, ASL just surpassed German to become the third most studied language at the postsecondary level, but there are only a handful of tenure-track positions across the nation for actual deaf people. In a special display of discrimination, onetime progressive beacon Columbia University is happy to profit from ASL courses but refuses to give participants foreign language credit (a degree requirement for many students), positing that ASL is not worthy of rigorous academic study without a written form. Students decried this injustice back in 2009, but no discernable updates have been made since. (Columbia’s Office of Public Affairs did not respond to a request for comment.)

Out on the worldwide web, signed language is routinely co-opted by non-deaf social media influencers for clout, so much so that fake ASL taught on TikTok has begun to infiltrate real-world communities, emboldening e-learners to approach deaf people only to sign gibberish or curse words. In an especially bizarre sequence, a hearing teen named Lola gained the ire of the deaf community after she gave ASL lessons to over two hundred thousand Instagram followers that contained frequent elementary errors. Despite pleas from deaf people to stop, she refused. The drama came to a head when she inexplicably presented herself to the University of Alabama Athletics Department as a qualified (adult) ASL interpreter. The school let her sign a nonsensical version of the national anthem at a baseball game before learning they’d been tricked, at which point they disavowed her performance.

Over three hundred signed languages exist across the world, each with its own grammar, syntax, vocabulary, and aesthetic that can be inscrutable to the quiet-challenged.

Hearing interpreters routinely go viral for performing music interpretations; deaf performers with better translations earn far fewer views. One recent example of this tiresomely common phenomenon is Kelly Kurdi’s serviceable interpretation of Megan Thee Stallion’s “WAP” eclipsing the objectively better translation by deaf performer Raven Sutton. Hearing actors engaging in disability drag take on deaf roles in movies and TV, but only to enact various fantasies about deafness: namely, a fetishization of our interactions with music, as in The Sound of Metal. Rarely is there a place in either academia or art where the hearing majority’s relationship to deaf culture is anything more than a very lopsided transaction. The hearing world is enthralled with the beauty, ingenuity, and communication possibilities signed language presents, so long as it doesn’t have to look upon or give credit to actual deaf people.

A particularly egregious case study of the extraction of deaf people from deaf language has recently appeared in the form of an artificial sign-based system called Makaton. Makaton is marketed by the British charity of the same name to parents and specialists as “a unique communication programme that uses symbols (pictures), signs (gestures) and speech to enable people to communicate.” Today, Makaton boasts over four hundred thousand users across the UK and pulls in about £1.5 million annually. Makaton is even integrated into some of the BBC’s children’s programming. Through Makaton, it’s said, families and teachers can finally communicate with intellectually disabled children.

For a price, that is. Families are welcome to join the Makaton community and give their disabled children the precious gift of communication, with an introductory course starting at £60. Outside of paying the organization, there’s really no way to use the Makaton coursework (except maybe by paying a trained tutor with a side hustle). It’s a closed system. Unlike real languages, there are no free dictionaries and there are only limited open-source materials outside the organization’s control.

So what is it about the Makaton programming that makes it so “unique?” The secret ingredient dates back to 1972, when Margaret Walker, the senior speech therapist at Botley’s Park Hospital in Surrey, introduced a selection of 145 British Sign Language words to deaf-disabled patients and staff to facilitate communication between the two groups. It was also an opportunity for Walker to collect data on language acquisition, and her study “revealed” that the deaf patients learned signed language easily and communicated effectively using the BSL vocabulary. No shit.

Here’s where it gets really wild: rather than teach the deaf-disabled patients more BSL, bring in deaf mentors who could provide robust language access, or share data about the potential value of visual language for intellectually disabled people with specialists in the field, Walker, along with two colleagues, Kathy Johnston and Tony Cornforth, expanded their BSL vocabulary list to about 350 signs. Then, using the first letters of their names—Ma, Ka, Ton—they trademarked it. The real innovation behind Makaton is the gall to trademark another community’s language. In Walker’s hearing hands, BSL suddenly became a commodity.

Hear No Evil

The alleged proprietary nature of Makaton is in its register shift. Grammatical markers natural to BSL are simplified or abandoned so that Makaton is essentially BSL signs confusingly used in spoken English word order, and often simultaneously with speech, to emphasize parts of an English sentence. Vocabulary is limited to their preselected signs, about 450 total words. Makaton and its trainers argue that limited vocabulary is key for communication with intellectually disabled or disabled-and-nonspeaking autistic people. At best, the claim is nonsense; Team Makaton no more invented register shift than Al Gore invented the internet. “We know that during first language acquisition of BSL, adults using child-directed signing modify it in a range of ways, and that children responding in BSL will make a range of approximations in the signs they use—spontaneous simplifications of sign handshapes, locations, and movements,” wrote University of Birmingham’s professor of linguistics Adam Schembri in an email exchange. Speakers of all languages shift their register depending on both audience and setting. BSL is no exception.

A BSL signer might alter their vocabulary, syntax, sentence length, and other elements of linguistic complexity based on the age, ability of their conversation partner (and whether that person was intellectually disabled), as well as the degree of formality and familiarity in which the conversation is taking place. These modifications don’t mean the person is no longer speaking BSL, in the same way that I’m still speaking the same language, though differently, to a five-year-old and to my graduate students. But I never take a list of conversational nouns to the patent office so that I might reap the monetary rewards of my newly minted English™ as though I am some kind of genius for saying “potty” to my preschooler and “restroom” while at the head of the classroom.

While the marketing and price tag of Makaton may suggest they’re doing something new and different, their messaging to the British public has been decidedly murkier, with many people not understanding the difference between Makaton and BSL. “Where I see the most divisive effect is in cases where hearing individuals and organizations are not aware of the difference between Makaton and BSL and seek out Makaton training which they believe will make their communication more inclusive,” said Schembri. “I don’t know how often the Makaton Charity explains the key differences, and sometimes the individuals and organizations can be surprised at the pushback from the deaf community when it turns out they can only provide Makaton and not BSL.”

That Makaton telegraphs itself as a real language, either purposefully or simply via ubiquity in British culture, has real consequences for actual BSL users. The British Deaf Association, a deaf community-run organization, has clashed with the Makaton Charity and its perception by the British public: “Our community has long expressed concern that the difference between Makaton and BSL is poorly understood by the general public and institutional authorities in the United Kingdom,” said Graham Turner, the BDA’s policy and research lead, via email. “We wish to see UK institutions (e.g., emergency services) making informed choices when commissioning staff training,” said Turner. “It needs to be absolutely clear to them that learning Makaton will not, for example, assist ambulance crews to communicate with Deaf patients.”

Because it plays its cards so close to its wallet, it’s often difficult to know the extent to which Makaton has departed from BSL. We do know that in some cases, Makaton-issued signs have a totally different meaning in BSL—for example, the Makaton for “crab” appears more like “undulating vagina” in BSL. At other turns, it’s easy for those of us familiar with signed language conventions to see something more sinister about the places where the two languages diverge: Makaton’s own signs are often more complex than BSL’s. The BSL sign for “giraffe” uses one handshape and a continuous, upward motion, whereas the Makaton sign transitions to a second handshape that references the giraffe’s head and requires additional dexterity and memory of the combination. Makaton trainers also insist that the fingers be pressed together when forming number signs, making them more difficult to read than the BSL-style, or the way humans naturally hold up their fingers to display numbers. In these kinds of compromises, Makaton loyalists tell on themselves: the program isn’t “simpler” or “better” for the deaf or disabled user, it is only easier for the creators of a proprietary product to control.

It’s difficult to imagine that such a tightly controlled program has been designed for anything other than compliance with the desires of the tongue-tied overlords who “invented” it.

Here is the crux of the problem with Makaton: beyond the appropriation of intellectual property from a marginalized community and taking money from ill-informed families, the true cost of Makaton is that it limits one’s language, which takes away that person’s ability to think beyond the bounds of the words they know. Ableist prophecies that a disabled person might not be able to use complex language are fulfilled when that person never gets a chance. Makaton’s claims that its system helps those with intellectual disabilities regardless of hearing status develop their receptive language skills are refuted by the limited vocabulary for sale. The best-case scenario is that a hearing disabled person will be able to fill in receptive gaps left by Makaton via the spoken English with which it’s paired; however, nonspeaking folks’ expressive language will still be limited to the 450 words selected for them. The most likely scenario is a diminished capacity for language fluency for all users. How will a person learn a new vocabulary word or grammatical nuance if they never see the word or sentence modeled by a fluent signer?

This concern compounds when hearing loss is also at play. While the Makaton organization bills itself as being for “very different communities” than BSL, it’s unclear whether this information is reaching parents and teachers in an actionable way, given that the public is already confused about the difference between the two. Disability and deafness also frequently go hand in hand, presenting further complexities. For example, the Makaton website features a man with Down syndrome on its header as someone for whom Makaton would be appropriate, but 50 to 80 percent of people with Down syndrome also have hearing loss. An intellectually disabled person with hearing loss funneled into the Makaton system could experience additional cognitive damage due to language deprivation. Without the incidental English input of hearing Makaton users, a Makaton user with hearing loss would be even more trapped within the confines of a predetermined vocabulary. How are Makaton users supposed to think or feel beyond the bounds of the system? It’s difficult to imagine that such a tightly controlled program has been designed for anything other than compliance with the desires of the tongue-tied overlords who “invented” it.

The Sound of Silence

For the past two years, the British Deaf Association has been engaging with Makaton, even contributing to a review of the Charity’s materials in an effort to bring more clarity to the roles of Makaton and BSL. “Ideally, we would like to see all Makaton users being able to build upon initial experiences of gestural communication, guided by Deaf BSL [or ISL] teachers,” said Turner. He noted the BDA’s continued work to open lines of support and help Makaton users transition back to British and Irish Sign, “towards development of fluency in the rich, dynamic natural language of our community.” Turner said the work is expected to take “a number of years.”

But Makaton’s trademark restricts the minds of its users, as well as those who are allowed to access it. Makaton’s market for “resources” continues to grow, taking additional signs from BSL while inventing others seemingly at random, widening the divide between those who speak BSL and those who use Makaton. Basic signs like “water,” “more,” and “cat” differ between the two systems, making it more difficult for even deaf, neurotypical BSL signers to fill in the gaps between their language and Makaton. Deaf, disabled, and deaf-disabled people who might have been in community with one another are now isolated by the hands of Big Language. Meanwhile, Margaret Walker continues to be hailed as the inventor of British Sign Lang—I mean, Makaton—and received the Pride of Britain’s Special Recognition award for her work in 2019.

While Makaton has its largest foothold by far in the UK, the organization has outposts in Cyprus, France, Germany, Gibraltar, Greece, India, Japan, Kuwait, New Zealand, Pakistan, Poland, Russia, South Africa, and Switzerland, taking signs from each country’s own local deaf community to craft its unique programming. When deaf people try to warn about the predatory nature of Makaton, we are accused of being cruel to the intellectually disabled. “Sometimes [this pushback] is interpreted by some hearing individuals, unfortunately, as ableism or prejudice, which is a tragic misunderstanding, and I do worry about the parents and children who use Makaton getting caught up in this clash, but clearly I support deaf people’s desire to call this whole situation out as deeply problematic,” said Schembri, in a somewhat more generous interpretation of these interactions. In my own experience, parents of disabled children hate nothing more than having the bill of goods they’ve been sold on the internet invalidated, even if that bill is ableist. So they misunderstand anger over Makaton’s stolen signs as some kind of a brand feud, rather than a plea for them to understand that language should not be for sale at all. “Oh, so you’re against communication?” they say. “Don’t you want them to have language?”

Yes, exactly. Language. Full, rich, vibrant, and as complex as the speaker is ready for. A culture, history, and access to a community of peers and mentors who can all sign together. Free and open-source, as real languages are, for everybody. “The history of Makaton as a system that has appropriated BSL, and that BSL is actually the natural majority signed language of the UK’s deaf community, may not be information that these hearing individuals and organizations are ever given access to when they opt for Makaton, and this needs to change,” said Schembri.

At the behest of the BDA, the Makaton Charity has recently added a statement to a sub-tab of their website noting that Makaton is “not a complete, natural language like BSL but rather a supplementary communication system” and is intended for use with “different communities” than BSL. The BDA noted that they continue to seek the removal of the word “language” from Makaton’s marketing. No efforts by the Makaton organization to clarify the program’s uses, limits or appropriative origins are immediately visible at this time, and the charity did not respond to request for comment.

What we do know is that Makaton is working on a North American rollout. Their placeholder website lists a future online course promising access to the “language program” that “has helped millions of children and adults with communication worldwide” for $650. If past programs are any indication, most of the signs for North American Makaton will be taken from ASL, when not altogether made up. Whatever the case, the result will be that disabled nonspeaking folks who today learn ASL and communicate openly with deaf and other signing people in a fully realized language will, under Makaton, end up even more isolated, their expressions limited to the world behind a paywall and dependent on the whims of those who see the human right to language as their road to revenue.