Language planning and language policies for sign languages: an emerging civil rights movement

Abstract Following the publication of William Stokoe’s Sign Language Structure in 1960, there was a proliferation of linguistic research addressing different aspects of sign languages. The emergence of this research had implications not only for linguistics as an academic discipline, but also for the deaf community itself. One area in which the study of sign languages and the growing activism of deaf communities overlapped in powerful ways was in calls for the official recognition of sign languages – that is, with respect to status planning. In addition to status planning, there have also been clear examples of corpus planning, acquisition planning, and prestige planning with respect to sign languages. Although efforts to engage in language planning for sign languages, and to develop and implement language policies for such languages, share many characteristics with language planning targeting spoken languages, in other ways they are quite distinctive. In this article, an overview of language planning and policy for sign languages is provided, followed by discussions of the linguistic human rights of sign language users and the role of language policies for sign languages in efforts to ensure civil rights for deaf individuals and communities.