How this N.S. woman is working to revitalize Maritime Sign Language
An endangered language, MSL is unique to Atlantic Canada and is slowly being lost
A Nova Scotia woman is working to preserve and revitalize Maritime Sign Language before it's lost.
As a Deaf child of Deaf parents in Halifax in the 1960s, Bev Buchanan learned MSL at home.
MSL is a descendant of British Sign Language, which was used in the Atlantic region during the 1800s.
But as American Sign Language became the dominant sign language — the one taught in schools for the Deaf community across the continent — MSL was slowly lost.
"Sign languages are some of the fastest-disappearing language," Buchanan told CBC News through an interpreter. "If we don't preserve them and document them, they will disappear faster."
ASL-English interpreter Brenna D'Arcy facilitated the interview with Buchanan.
'Preserving an identity'
In 2021, Buchanan earned her doctorate in education at Lamar University in Texas, writing her dissertation on the preservation of Maritime Sign Language.
After decades of living in the United States, she's back home in Nova Scotia, where she was hired as the program manager for American Sign Language and Interpretation studies at the Nova Scotia Community College in Dartmouth.
Buchanan is the first Deaf program manager at the school, and has her sights set on developing an MSL curriculum.
She said the students are "very curious" about MSL, and many faculty members either learned some MSL growing up or moved from out of province and are committed to learning it.
"The work that Bev is doing ... is not just preserving a language, but preserving an identity, a culture," said Justin Read, who learned MSL at home as a child and is now an instructor of the ASL/English interpretation program at the college.
Read, as well as Buchanan, make the distinction between lowercase deaf, used in discussions around medical deafness, and uppercase Deaf when talking about community, culture and personal identity.
Read said his parents were Deaf and Deaf-blind, and attended the Halifax School for the Deaf and the Amherst School for the Deaf.
"[It's] just something that needs to be there for future generations to look back at and see where and how sign language has evolved and changed over time," he said.
What is MSL?
Derived from British Sign Language, MSL uses two-handed spelling, unlike ASL's one-handed alphabet, and there are some different signs for different words and phrases.
MSL was taught at the Halifax School for the Deaf until it closed in 1960. After that, students attended the Amherst School for the Deaf, and eventually the school got new teachers who brought American Sign Language with them.
"You can pinpoint that shift right there with the change in schools," Buchanan said.
MSL is still used by older people in the region, but it hasn't been passed down to younger generations.
"When we see MSL out there, it really connects us with our childhood and growing up, and allows us to just have that connection to the Deaf community," Read said.
Buchanan said she's one of fewer than 100 native MSL signers left in Nova Scotia.
Preservation efforts
People in the Maritime Deaf community have been working to preserve MSL for years, documenting the language on video.
As part of her dissertation work, Buchanan accessed those videos through the Nova Scotia Cultural Society of the Deaf.
In analyzing more than 20 videos, she found more than 3,000 examples of signs, including 900 that were distinct to MSL. She catalogued all of them and created an online glossary.
Those videos and glossary would be the jumping-off point for a semester-long MSL curriculum she's hoping to develop.
"It's absolutely incredible that [Bev] took this daunting task on," Read said.
He said interpreters in the region have an "ethical duty" to incorporate MSL into their work.
"It's a great resource not only for interpreters, but for young deaf individuals out there who want to learn more about the history of language, more about the history of Deaf culture in the Maritimes."
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