Navigating Multilingual Deaf Education

In Africa, the education of deaf individuals has sparked discussions centered around the recognition of sign languages as official languages. Interestingly, many African countries have adopted foreign languages as their official tongues, and foreign-based sign languages have been employed for deaf education across the continent. This has led to a fascinating dynamic where educated deaf signers in African communities possess proficiency in multiple sign languages as well as spoken languages. As a result, these signing communities have become intricate and multilingual in nature.

The chapter, "Challenges and Opportunities of Teaching in Multilingual Deaf Communities in Sub-Saharan Africa", explores the challenges and opportunities of teaching in multilingual deaf communities in sub-Saharan Africa. It argues for a bimodal multilingual approach to deaf education, allowing students to access both the deaf and hearing worlds. The chapter also emphasizes the importance of preserving indigenous African sign languages without making them inferior.

Read a Preview of the Chapter here.

Mary Edward has a PhD (Linguistics) from the University of Brighton (UK),MA from the University of Bergen (Norway) and BA from the University of Ghana (Legon). Her research interests include iconicity in sign languages, multilingualism, phonology of signed languages, morphology of signed languages, sign language typology (foreign-based and indigenous sign languages) Deaf Culture, diverse areas of the sociolinguistics of Deaf communities in Ghana and discourse analysis. She has presented her research in several international conferences and has (co-)authored several research papers on iconicity in sign language, phonology and morphology of sign languages, multilingualism, deaf culture, sociolinguistics of deaf societies, and discourse analysis. She is currently working with Save the Deaf and Endangered Languages Initiative (S-DELI) as an instructor.