ORANGE EYES
Bimodal bilingualism in hearing adults from deaf families
Written by Michele Bishop and Sherry Hicks
For Codas everywhere
FOOTNOTES
- Coda is the acronym for Children of Deaf Adults and refers to the hearing person with deaf parents. The fully capitalized acronym 'CODA' stands for the international organization that meets annually to celebrate a 'third identity', which is made up of both deaf and hearing 'parts'.
The term 'CODA' was chosen for its significance as a musical term. The musical term is defined as a piece of music that appears at the end of a composition that may have elements from the main composition but which also has its own unique elements.
- Not all hearing children from deaf families sign fluently. There are many factors that determine the fluency of the child: i.e. whether the parents choose to speak with their children, the birth order of the children, the presence of other siblings (deaf or hearing), the emphasis on oralism in deaf education, and the higher status of English as compared to ASL.
- Capital 'D' represents the political, linguistic, and cultural aspect of being deaf while the lowercase 'd' only refers to the audiological state of not being able to hear.
- Millie Brother is the founder ("flounder" in coda-talk) of CODA. The CODA International organization began in 1983. The first CODA conference was in 1986. Conferences are held annually and attended by codas from around the world.
- Gallaudet University is the only liberal arts university for deaf people in the world.
- Tom Bull recounted how Paul Preston's 150 interviews with codas lasted from 2-8 hours. These interviews were later turned into his book, Mother Father Deaf. (personal communication May 4, 2003).
- For further discussion on societal bilingualism see Romaine 1989.
- A barrio is the Spanish word for neighborhood
- For further discussion of how spoken language terminology is not adequate to describe sign and spoken language contact see Lucas and Valli. 1992. San Diego: Academic Press.
- B. Kraft and S.Hicks offered this expression to illustrate how codas play with language. The meaning is a play on the ASL words, "FURNITURE" and "NOTHING" which are both signed in the same way literally translating into English as; "You think I'm nothing? Well, I am not! I am a big deal!"
- C. Batson - personal communication via email from Australia (March 15, 2003)
- J. Johnston - response to question about 'deaf voice' (February 20, 2003)
- B. Kraft via email communication (February 20, 2003)
- A. Smith via email (February 19, 2003)
- C. Blackman via email (February 20, 2003)
- D. Ammon personal communication via email February 2003.
- This is a place for email postings for hearing people who have at least one deaf parent. As a hearing person I depended solely on those contributions forwarded to me directly so that I never accessed the site myself.
- 'Observer's paradox' is what happens when the exact phenomena that someone wants to study is altered by the presence of that observer.
- It is common in ASL to drop a subject that is made clear by grounded mental space (for further discussion see Liddell 2003). For more details on the other ASL features listed see Valli and Lucas 2002, Linguistics of American Sign Language.
- Sherry Hicks discusses aspects of coda identity including coda-talk in her MFA Thesis entitled, Deaf WORLD meets CODA Nation, 2001.
- This category 'the' was coined by S. Jacobs, T. Bull, B. Mendelsohn, S. Hicks, S. Russell and D. Prickett in March of 1991. It happened that an afternoon coda gathering resulted in hours of language play and the creation of many coda-isms (such as ORANGE category, 'you think me furniture' etc.)
- Coda stories get passed down from year to year at the CODA conferences. They become part of 'coda folklore' and are highly valued in the coda community (very similar to the high value placed on story telling in the Deaf community). References to stories were taken from Sherry Hicks' MFA Thesis 2001.
- TD is the acronym for "telecommunication device" which is used for communications between deaf people (and with hearing people as well). The typed message is sent via telephone lines.
- Abbreviations used for clarifying turn taking and flow of conversation were omitted since they are not applicable to the analysis of coda-talk found in emails.
- Mather explains the line breaks from the original TD communication have not carried over however the message is reproduced as exactly as possible.
Note: TD communication is always capitalized.
- Coda email excerpt from S. Hicks, March 2003
- This example was taken from J. Johnston's "Colony Story", 2003
- Information supplied by Tom Bull via personal communication on May 4, 2003
- A future study of coda-talk needs to include 'real-time' instant messaging between codas to see which linguistic conventions prevail.
- I believe some of these references appearing in 7-13 include Elmer Fudd, Bugs Bunny, and Saturday Night Live
- M. Thumann (coda) did mention to me that she had read a coda letter and instinctively felt that is was ungrammatical. Whether this means there are rules for coda-talk at this actually means linguistically has not yet been determined.
- This term is commonly understood to mean a hearing person speaking English while signing (although Deaf people may also sign and speak at the same time)
- For a more detailed discussion see Johnson R., Liddell S., Erting C. (1989). Unlocking the Curriculum: Principles for Achieving Access in Deaf Education.
- Excerpt from "True Stories" by Molly R. Wilson 2003 for an anthology of writings by Codas, Kodas and Deaf Parents being compiled by Tom Bull.
- This story was generously donated by A. Abarbanell, April 2003
- For further information on this kind of experience see, "Ordinary Evils", the 'notekey' address given by Bob Hoffmeister at the 2002 CODA conference in Philadelphia.
- For deeper discussion on of whether contact sign should be considered a pidgin, see Lane, Hoffmeister and Bahan (1996)