Mobile Media and the Sign Language of Zimbabwe’s Deaf Community

This chapter discusses prospects for the conservation and development of Zimbabwean Sign Language (ZSL) in light of the advent of mobile media technologies in Zimbabwe. The background to the discussion is that, in this developing country, less than 20 years ago many people who are deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) lived and grew up in large residential institutions, where they used prescribed hearing-aid technology and used ZSL underground as the latter was considered detrimental to the development of spoken language communication. With the advent of inclusive education and philosophies related to community-based rehabilitation, more people who are deaf now live and learn within their mainstream communities, where they make use of the more widely available mobile technology and therefore have greater communication demands and more communication partners outside their immediate spheres. The crux of the chapter’s discussion is that the increased opportunities to communicate with diverse populations may come with latent identity crises in the lives of some deaf people using mobile technologies. The crises potentially arise from the possibility that local norms and particularly culture-based signing conventions may be overshadowed and considered inferior to those originating elsewhere. On the other hand, if organizations of Deaf people are involved in strategizing, these mobile technologies have the potential to document local ZSL varieties. This would preserve ZSL and Deaf culture for posterity and so empower local Deaf people to view themselves as linguistic minority citizens who, like any other linguistic minority, do not require therapy.