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

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guage as apart of culture, though a very special part, is learned behavior, as is culture itself to be human is to be a cultural animal, but to become enculturated in any particular culture demands direct experience and learning.
It was all this, of course, that formed my thinking as early as 1957. I had learned from Smith and Trager that the system used by members of a culture to carry on all the activities of that culture is a language. I had come into a community where deaf people communicated with one another in a rapid and apparently quite satisfying manner without any need to speak or hear they had a culture of their own.
To be sure, in defining language as culturally based, Trager had said it was a system of vocal symbols. So it is for the great majority, but as early as that summer I began to develop the argument that (a) deaf people in each other's company most of the timeshare a culture (b) such a culture differs from standard American culture (or any of its variants) because of a radical difference in physiological foundations and (c) therefore, the system of gestural, not vocal, symbols used by deaf people is by definition a language. It was blindness to culture as a concept and inability to see cultural differences as anything but deficiencies that made those trained in speech and hearing, those most closely associated with deaf people,
those who "educated" the deaf, unable to see what was so plain to one familiar with the anthropological thinking of Trager and Smith.
In that summer institute I also learned about systems thinking. The principle was simply that it is impossible to understand a system by isolating one of the components for detailed study while ignoring that component's contribution to the working of the system as well as the system's effect on it. The application of this to the study of sign language was first to be careful the study needed many signersnot just one informant, but signers of different ages and different home backgroundsand different kinds of interaction.
Above all, I could not act as expert or judgeI never learned the language to the degree that accomplished interpreters have.
My task was to see how its users used the language, especially the contrasts and the equivalences they

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