What is Deafness

Deaf People Are People

More important than understanding any single term about deafness is understanding that deaf people are people. The two million deaf people in the United Sates are tall and short, thin and stout, black, white, red, brown, and yellow, male and female, and young and old.

Some deaf people are highly intelligent and others are merely average; many are athletic while some are clumsy. Deaf people may be personable and vivacious or quiet and reserved. Some deaf people are high achievers; others are not.

Deaf individuals have families, hold jobs, attend churches and synagogues, make installment payments, throw parties, and watch television. They have aspirations, suffer disappointments, and enjoy success.

Deaf people are more like you than they are unlike you. Their deafness is only one facet of their multidimensional characters. Each deaf person is as unique as you are.

All deaf people share one thing in common: some physical impairment has caused a hearing loss, a condition where the hearing mechanism does not function as it should. Many people think deafness is a loss of hearing only; however, it is not that simple.

"Deafness is a knack in which nature endows us with an inability to see sounds as well as the ability to hear images." - Daniel Nakaji

What Does It Mean To Be Deaf?

The significant consequence of deafness is being cut off from the means of acquiring and transmitting spoken language which most people enjoy. As a result, communication is affected. The majority of deaf people are born into hearing families. Often, deafness among these children goes undetected for a long time and as a result, these children must learn, rather than acquire, a first language. The major communication difficulty for most deaf people is not having a language frame of reference when they are learning to speak, write, or speech read.

Normal hearing allows the enjoyment of engaging in natural spoken conversation, listening to radio announcements, understanding news or entertainment programs on television, catching conversational tidbits through eavesdropping, and sharing the latest joke. These types of input which hearing people may take for granted must be accessed by deaf or hard of hearing individual through sign communication, interpreters, and closed captioning for them to be equally sophisticated about their environment.

"Deafness is no barrier as long as we have communication through Sign Language." - Daniel Humphries

Deafness

The way in which deaf and hard of hearing individuals interact with you and with their environment is dependent on many factors:

• natural intelligence
• personality
• family climate
• age at onset of deafness
• language background
• degree of hearing loss
• communication skills
• Your attitude toward them

Without understanding these factors, people may ask: "How do deaf people feel about. . .?" "What do deaf people do for fun?" "Do deaf people like to. . .?" In light of all these variables which influence a person's uniqueness, it seems clear that we cannot make generalizations about "deaf people" as a group.

People deal with their deafness and their worlds in their own way. Each deserves the dignity of being openly and willingly approached as an individual with unique qualities and skills.

Understanding The Jargon

There are many specialized terms related to the field of deafness. A few expressions used frequently and often misunderstood or misused include:

Deaf/Deafness - a condition in which perceivable sounds (including speech) have no meaning for ordinary life purposes.

Hard of Hearing - a condition where the sense of hearing is defective but functional for some ordinary life purposes (usually with the help of a hearing aid).

Residual Hearing - the amount of hearing a person has; the ability to understand speech varies with the residual hearing of the individual.

Deaf-mute or Deaf and Dumb - derogatory terms describing a person without hearing or speech. It associates lack of hearing and speech with stupidity, a theory that has been disproved by many brilliant, non-speaking deaf people. This phrase is no longer acceptable in describing deaf people.

Congenital Deafness - deafness occurring at birth.

Adventitious Deafness - deafness occurring sometime after birth.

Prelingual Deafness - deafness occurring before the acquisition of language (usually before three years of age). Such a person has no language frame of reference for English when learning to speak, write, or speech read.

Postlingual Deafness - deafness occurring after the acquisition of language (usually after three years of age). In most cases, persons who have lost their hearing after this age have a relatively strong language base.

Late Deafened - deafness occurring during adulthood. In most cases, deafness has occurred after the completion of high school.

Cultural Deafness - the way in which many members of the deaf community view themselves, within hearing society but separate from hearing culture. Deaf culture can be delineated by social customs (identifying oneself as from a school for the deaf rather than a city or a state or unique greeting rituals), shared experiences and a reverence for American Sign Language (ASL). Membership in the deaf culture is a source of pride for many deaf and hard of hearing people.

"When deaf people ask me what it is like to be deaf, I know they're interested in finding out how my life is different from their own. I tell them I can't answer the question because I don't know what it is like to be hearing. To me deafness is not a disability; it is a way of life. I don't dwell on it. I don't even think about it except when I can't do the things that would come relatively easy to a hearing person, like making an emergency call on the freeway. Otherwise, I'm very contented with life as it is." - Herbert W. Larson, Director, National Center on Deafness

 

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