THE Brazilian Sign Language, widely known for Pounds, is used by millions of deaf and hearing Brazilians. According to IBGE, there are more than ten million people with some hearing impairment in Brazil. The education of deaf people in the country – which resulted in the creation of Libras – dates back to the installation of the first school for the deaf in the 19th century.
The development of inclusion policies for the deaf community meant that, in 2002, Libras was recognized as the official language during the government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, by Law No. 10,436. This was the result of a broad mobilization of the deaf community in the struggle to expand their rights.
See more:Understand the importance of educational inclusion for the hearing impaired
Origin of Sign Language
Communication using hands was a reality in prehistoryrwas going, but, little by little, it was replaced by orality, as the hands began to be occupied by handling the tools. Due to the predominance of oral language, deaf people began to be excluded from human interaction.
At Ancient Greece, the deaf were not considered competent human beings, because for the Greeks, without speech, there was no language and no knowledge, so the deaf were openly marginalized. At Ancient Rome, the deaf were also deprived of their rights and could not make their wills.
At Middle Ages, in turn, until the 12th century, the Catholic Church considered that the soul of the deaf was not immortal, as they could not pronounce the sacraments. It was just at Modern age that the first deaf teacher appeared: Pedro Ponce de León, a Benedictine monk born in Spain.
![Statue in honor of Pedro Ponce de León, a Benedictine monk considered one of the pioneers in deaf education.[1]](/f/3d1b9d276747286be4162b66675f36db.jpg)
Pedro Ponce taught his students to speak, read and write so that they could guarantee their inheritances and, with this, he showed that deaf people were capable of learning. This Benedictine monk managed to create a manual that taught writing and oralization techniques, being able to teach deaf people to speak different languages.
Other important contributions were made by JuanPabloBonet and by John Bulwer, for example. Bulwer is considered one of the first to advocate the use of sign signs to create a language for the deaf.
The great name in the development of a language for the deaf was the French teacher Charles-Michel de l'Épée. He was a French abbot who dedicated himself to the education of the deaf with the aim of being able to educate them according to the principles of Christianity.
Subject matter experts call it “father of the deaf” and claim that he was the first to create, in the second half of the 18th century, an alphabet of signs to teach the deaf to read and write. He used this alphabet to teach his deaf students at the school he created in 1755.
See too: December 3rd — International Day of Persons with Disabilities
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Origin of Brazilian Sign Language
The French Sign Language, developed from the method developed by the aforementioned abbot l'Épée, had great importance in the consolidation of the Brazilian Sign Language. That's because Libras was created based on the method created by the French in the 18th century.
Here in Brazil, the pioneer in deaf education was the French teacher Ernest Huet, who moved to Brazil in 1855 at the invitation of the emperor d. Pedro II. Here in Brazil, Huet was behind the creation of the first school dedicated to the education of the deaf, the so-called Imperial Institute for the Deaf and Dumb.
This institute was created through the Law No. 839, of September 26, 1857, and received, in boarding school, only male students. The French teacher, who was also deaf, taught and was in charge of the school. In 1861, however, Huet left the direction of the institute and went to Mexico.
It was through Huet that the French Sign Language was brought to Brazil and it was through it that the foundations for the formulation of a sign language specific to Brazil were established. Libras was consolidated from signs that were already used in Brazil, along with the influence of the French Sign Language and signs created by L’Epée, called “methodical signs”.
Huet's education system, which was based on the use of signals, had its diffusion partially harmed here in Brazil because of a decision taken in the Milan Congress, in 1880. This congress determined the prohibition, in Europe, douse of signals and determined that deaf education should only take place through oralization.
This decision was much criticized and, at the time, was based on a belief of the delegates to this event about a possible cure for deafness. Thus, the use of signs to the detriment of education based on oralization. Despite this, the use of gestures in deaf education continued to be used.
In 1911, the National Institute of Deaf Education (former Imperial Institute of Deaf-Mutes) decided to adopt the determination of the Milan Congress here in Brazil and determined that pure oralism should be the only form of education for deaf people in the parents.
Since then, the education of deaf people through sign language was marginalized, but even so, it continued being used, since there was great resistance from deaf students to being educated only through oralism pure.
It was only in the late 1970s that a method called total knowledge, characterized by the use of sign language, oral language and other means used in deaf education and understood as methods that facilitated communication.
In the 1980s and 1990s, groups in defense of the deaf community began to organize and demand from the Brazilian government a proposal for greater and more democratic inclusion for Brazilian deaf people. In this context, sign language was not yet understood nationally as a language.
The mobilization around the expansion of the rights of the deaf in Brazil resulted in a first great achievement with the 1988 Constitution, since the text guarantees education as a right for all and also entitles the right to specialized educational services in the regular school system.
Other advances have taken place through the Law guidelines and bases of national education, 1996 (Law No. 9,394/96), and Law No. 10,098, of December 19, 2000. Libras, however, was only recognized as a language after the aforementioned Law No. 10,436, which determined the following:
Art. 1ºThe Brazilian Sign Language – Libras and other expression resources associated with it is recognized as a legal means of communication and expression.
Single paragraph. Brazilian Sign Language - Libras is understood as the form of communication and expression, in which the linguistic system of a visual-motor nature, with their own grammatical structure, constitute a linguistic system for the transmission of ideas and facts, coming from communities of deaf people in the Brazil.
This law was regulated a few years later through the Decree No. 5626, of December 22, 2005. The set of these laws ensured great advances for Brazil in the inclusion of the deaf community, since it established the teaching of Libras, as part of the training of teachers in the country, guaranteed access to specialized professionals to serve this audience, etc.
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Main features of Libras
Libras is, or should be, the mother tongue of the Brazilian deaf, that is, the first language with which he has contact. Unlike the Portuguese language of the oral-auditory modality, which uses the voice as a channel, Libras is directly linked to facial movements and expressions to be understood by the recipient of the message.
A negative sentence, for example, will be interpreted thanks to the movement of the head, and a question will be understood as questioning by the facial expression of doubt. Such facial expressions can be considered complements to the meanings of phrases said in Libras and, therefore, this language belongs to the gestural-visual modality.
One of the main aspects that classify Libras as a language is its proper grammatical organization. Its phrasal structures, for example, do not follow the structure of the Portuguese language. Sentence constructions in Libras are more objective and flexible, even though they mostly follow the subject-verb-object pattern. For example, the phrase “I'm going to the movies later tonight” in Libras can be transmitted as “I-cinema-tonight-night” or “Tonight-cinema”.
Another important point is that, at Libras, each word has its own sign and, when there is still no sign, we can identify it with the help of typing, that is, with the spelling through the alphabet in Libras.
Libras: language or language?
Contrary to what many believe, the Libras is not a language, it is a language, because it is spoken by a people, has its own well-defined rules, structures, syntax, semantics and pragmatics. Language, on the other hand, is the mechanism used to convey our ideas and can be either verbally or non-verbally.
Read more:Understand the difference between language and language.in
National Day of the Deaf
O National Day of the Deaf is celebrated on September 26 in honor of the foundation of the first school for the deaf in Brazil, which took place in 1857, in Rio de Janeiro, and which today is the National Institute of Deaf Education (INES). In addition to the National Day of the Deaf, the deaf community has other important dates to celebrate during the month and, with that, we have the September Blue.
September 1st: birthday of Law No. 12,319, which regulates the exercise of the profession of translator and interpreter of Brazilian Sign Language.
September 10th: World Sign Language Day, date that alludes to the congress on deafness in Milan, which took place on September 10, 1880, in which the use of sign language was banned throughout the world. Over time, the date was considered remarkable because of the resistance of the deaf community to continue using sign language.
September 30th: International Day of the Deaf and Translator/Interpreter Day.
Accessibility Law
In Brazil, there are different laws and decrees that deal with accessibility for people with disabilities. In the case of the deaf, two laws can be considered as a reference. THE Accessibility Law, of December 19, 2000, for example, defines that the government must guarantee people with hearing impairment the right to information, through the elimination of any barrier that may impede communication, and should promote the training of interpreters of Pounds.
Law No. 10,436, of 2002, known as Pounds Law, recognizes Libras as the natural language of the deaf and places it as a duty of public bodies to support and spread Libras and promote the language in undergraduate and speech therapy courses. In addition, the law also aims to ensure that the health system provides adequate care for the deaf.
Curiosities about the Brazilian Sign Language - Libras
Libras is not universal, each country has its own sign language.
The term 'deaf mute' it no longer exists, as deaf people can learn to speak if they are subjected to oralization techniques. Therefore, the correct thing is to just say deaf.
In the deaf community, each person receives their own signal. This sign is usually something related to physical appearance, such as long hair, a scar or even braces in one of the ears.
All regions of the country have a faculty of Letters-Libras to train basic education teachers and interpreters of Brazilian Sign Language. As examples, we can cite the Federal University of Goiás (UFG), the Federal University of Amazonas (UFAM), the Federal University of Alagoas (UFAL), the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC) and the Federal University of Rio de January (UFRJ).
Image credit:
[1] aquatrkus and Shutterstock
By Daniel Neves
Graduated in History and Vivian Melo
