A Grammar of German Sign Language (DGS)

The history of German deaf education and the development of German Sign Language and its community started with the foundation of the first public deaf school in Leipzig in 1778 by Samuel Heinicke. Heinicke chose to teach deaf children with the oralist approach, later referred to as the ‘German method’. Through this method, the focus of education lay intensely on teaching deaf children how to orally articulate spoken language (e.g. through feeling speech vibrations) and how to lip read. Articulation training stands even before teaching reading and writing. The assumption behind that method was that deaf children are only intellectually stimulated by spoken language. Until 1900, around 90 deaf schools were founded in the area of the whole German territory (Germany as it is today was established later in 1949, and its borders differ a lot to those in the 19th and early 20th century), and many of them adopted the oral method.

Up until 1880, the oral method was well-known, but various other teaching methods also existed in some deaf schools across Germany and Europe, too. Many deaf schools also had a deaf teacher, who used a sign language to communicate in class and was thus a role model for deaf children. Famous German deaf teachers are: Johann Karl Habermaß (1783-1826, Germany’s first documented deaf teacher at the “Königliches Taubstummeninstitut” in Berlin), Margaretha Hüttmann (1789-1854, Germany’s first female deaf teacher at the school for the deaf in Schleswig), Otto Friedrich Kruse (1801-1880, another deaf teacher from the school for the deaf in Schleswig well-known as a writer), Carl Heinrich Wilke (1800-1876, a deaf teacher at the school for the deaf in Schleswig and a famous illustrator for school books and picture boards for the deaf) and Carl Teuscher (1803-1835, a deaf teacher at the school for the deaf in Leipzig). The so-called “combined method”, i.e. a mixture of signed and written language, which also includes spoken language at times, was very common until 1880. However, after the Congress of Milan in the same year, deaf teachers and the usage of sign language at these schools were expelled. The oral method became dominant, although even sporadically hearing teachers (such as Johann Heidsieck (1855-1942) in his later years in Breslau) were arguing against the preoccupying oral method.

In the 20th century, a new educational idea was born, which tried to combine the oral method with new elements of hearing training through musical instruments, rhythm exercises, and listening-speaking training. This new method came to being as hearing aid technologies became more common and led to a separation of former deaf schools into schools for the deaf and schools for the hard of hearing. This differentiation of schools is a unique phenomenon in the German history of deaf education, which might explain the origin of the long oral tradition in Germany.

In the 1970s, deaf people began to provide sign language in courses and protest against the oral tradition. Then, during the 1980s, the first research on the Deaf Community and on DGS was carried out, led by Siegmund Prillwitz from Hamburg and Gundula List from Cologne. In 1987 Prillwitz founded the Institute of German Sign Language and Communication of the Deaf at the University of Hamburg, with courses and research on sign language linguistics and interpreting. In 1992, as a result of that activities and even public demonstrations, the first official bilingual sign language class was set up at the school for the deaf in Hamburg, currently known as the bilingual school experiment.

Since the 1990’s, the separation of deaf and hard-of-hearing-schools has disappeared. New Special Schools for Communication and Hearing have gradually become more common and are using diverse methods with sign language, sign supported speech and spoken/written language. Recent statistics showed that there is at least one Deaf teacher in about three quarters of that schools but only third of the schools has an official sign language curriculum.

Germany ratificatied the UN-Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2008. Afterwards, starting around 2010, there is a visible trend to include deaf children with sign language interpreters in the mainstream schools for an equal and higher education.

Nowadays in most cases, deaf children have three options to attend a school: a deaf school with either the bilingual approach or with sign supported oral methods, or a mainstream school with sign language interpreters, depending on their communicative and educational needs. There is currently one mainstream school (in Erfurt) teaching Deaf and hearing children together with the bilingual method.