Cover next page > title: Seeing Language in Sign : The Work of William C. Stokoe author

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Page have a sophisticated language and culture of their owncannot "penetrate to the real center" is explainable in part by the discoveries he made. American Sign Language is the legitimate language of a cultural minority. By "legitimizing" their language, Stokoe, in some sense, gave the deaf minority the power to decide who is and who is not a member. This is not to say that deaf people were unaware that they had a language and culture before Bill Stokoe published the results of his research. But no one before Stokoe had conducted scientific studies to validate that fact and show the world that ASL was a language worthy of examination and respect.
The observation Stokoe shared with Gil Eastman in the hotel hallway was just thatan observation. As a researcher whose lifelong interest was the language used by deaf people, it was fascinating for Stokoe to make this new discovery about the way deaf people interacted. And of course he was sincere in writing, around the same time, that as an "outsider" he was "humbly grateful for the hospitality and shared wisdom" shown to him by deaf people. 34 However, to be considered a member of deaf culture was not necessary to his personal happiness or his professional success.
Stokoe's life, in fact, was based very much in the hearing world. Although he had not taught literature for many years, he could recite verse after verse of his favorite British poets he loved riddles, puns, and plays on wordsall of which translated poorly when he tried to share them with deaf people. He played the bagpipes and loved Scottish music he loved English pub songs.
Bill Stokoe's discoveries led deaf people to anew level of empowerment. Even if that empowerment had resulted eventually in his being excluded from further research or participation in the deaf community (something that most certainly did not happen),
he would have derived satisfaction from his achievement.
But for hearing parents afraid of losing the ability to interact fully with their deaf children and for many teachers not fluent in
American Sign Language, it was hard to view the situation with equanimity. For them, Bill Stokoe and the Linguistics Research
Lab were rocking a very large boat. Many hearing people con-

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