Promote Deaf Literacy in Nigeria

The documentation, development and preservation of indigenous Nigerian Sign Languages has been a continuous process and has involved series of activities since 2016. Since after the first fieldwork documentation of Magajin Gari Sign Language (MgSL) in 2018, we have continued to incorporate signs from other indigenous Nigerian Deaf communities for the making of the first dictionary of indigenous Nigerian Signed Languages and the online version called Naija SignApp. With the limited funds available, we have equally engaged in the analysis and archiving of the documented signs.

This year, even amid the Covid-19 pandemic, we decided to take the project to a higher dimension, which of course has been our target for the project. In April, we put up a call to the Deaf community for volunteer Deaf signers who would be part of the next stage of the project. About 22 Deaf signers indicated interest in the project among whom 12 were selected after their screening, plus 4 Deaf signers who were selected to serve as Deaf leaders on the project. These were to work with a select number of S-DELI Project Team. The Project Team is made up of linguists, sign language interpreters and information technology experts.

The selected Deaf signers had weeks of training and orientation to prepare them for the project after which they were ready. About 300 lexical items would be signed into indigenous Nigerian signed languages by the Deaf signers from the comforts of their homes, using their cell phones. Signed videos would be sent to the Project Head for further analysis by the Project Team. Deaf signers were advised to contact other local Deaf signers to get help with words that they do not know their signs. This is to enable community contributions to the enrichment of the project data.

Deaf signers were provided subscription data worth of N1000 to sign their videos and send, while the Deaf leaders and the Project Team involved at this stage were provided subscription data of N500 each through the weeks they would engage with the project. The Deaf signers will be given additional financial incentives for their participation, especially after their videos have been approved as acceptable.

This is the current stage of the. The next stage of the project would be further classification and analysis of the lexical items signed into videos. The Linguistics team would determine what information would be incorporated into the project at this level, while the Information Technology team would determine the method of encoding and the format of the final product.

Additional signed language data was collected from an indigenous Deaf community in the Southwest of Nigeria by one of the Deaf leaders. The community is said to have close to a hundred Deaf signers. Further information about this community and their signed language will be shared in detail as that information becomes available to us.

I must say that this is a capital-intensive project from the beginning, and we have been managing with the meager funds available to us. We know that the project requires much more funding and support. We have a team with passion and dedication to the project, we have the plan laid out and we have the support of the Nigerian Deaf community, which is represented by the Nigerian National Association of the Deaf. With adequate funds, we will do this, because we believe in this as the only way to preserve the endangered indigenous Nigerian signed languages and to provide early signed language access to deaf children born in hearing families.

Since after the initial documentation of an indigenous Nigerian signed language – Magajingari Signed Language (MgSL) in 2018, we have taken the promotion of indigenous signed languages of African deaf communities very seriously, beginning with Nigeria. This is because we are aware that literacy acquisition for both deaf and hearing children begins at home and in the first five years of a child’s development. Deaf children in many Nigerian rural and urban communities lack early signed language access due to the absence of developed indigenous signed languages in their immediate environment. This is the background problem that our project “Promoting Deaf Literacy” seeks to solve, and this is the problem that led to the initial documentation of Magajingari signed languages, an endangered indigenous signed language used in Northern Nigeria.

This report is about the next level on our advocacy for deaf literacy through indigenous signed languages. Last year we hosted an 8 weeks online public lecture for deaf individuals, signed language interpreters, Deaf educators, linguists and other individuals that have something to do with signed languages and deaf people. We also held a public lecture across the seven states and cities in Nigeria during our Triple Action Project (TAP).

As we plan to have the TAP public lectures again in 2020, we have begun to put logistics and human capacity together to improve on what we had in 2019. This year’s public lecture which will still focus on promoting the indigenous signed languages for Deaf literacy will equally happen in not less than 7 states in Nigeria, targeting Deaf educators and government officials in charge of deaf affairs. The committee in charge of the public lecture and the entire TAP will soon resume work.

In addition to this, we launched a new lecture series on YouTube called “Indigenous Hands the Indigenous Voices”, which is designed to run on a weekly basis throughout the year 2020 and beyond. The YouTube series is a platform to discuss the vitality of the indigenous African signed languages and their importance in the raising of African deaf children. This program is currently seeking supports from friends and fans and so we are asking our friends and fans to subscribe to our YouTube channel. On the other hand, the program is aimed at spreading the fire to other African countries where indigenous signed languages are dying while deaf children have little or no access to signed language in the first five years of their lives.

Lastly, while we plan to have another elaborate signed language documentation exercise this year, we have continued to collect lexical data from across deaf communities. These data include name signs, deaf histories and other signed language items that inform us about more about Deaf life in Nigeria and Africa at large. These data collections are capital intensive and financially demanding as field volunteers do need some field materials plus transportations for this to be a success. We have come to realize that documenting the Magajingari signed language is just a tiny piece of the bigger project in promoting deaf literacy through indigenous signed languages. For this reason, we still reach out to our supporters for more. We will not stop until this is achieved!