Serbian Sign Language: officially recognised, yet not used in deaf education
The No Child Left Behind Act in the US (2001), the programme “Write it Right” in Australia (1994) and the Council of Europe’s project Languages of Schooling (2006) point towards a growing awareness of unequal access to education. All over the world legislative initiatives have been taken to ensure that all students have access, both in terms of social cost and linguistic barriers (Reffell & McKee, 2009). However, in some countries, the deaf community with its often invisible cultural linguistic identity appears not to benefit from the change in ideology towards equal education. In this paper we are looking at one such deaf community, i.e. the Serbian deaf community, and at past and present language ideologies, attitudes and practices with respect to their language, i.e. Serbian Sign Language or SZJ. We start by situating these ideological positions of language users and educators within a broader historical context by giving the first account of SZJ, its place in education and its history within the Western Balkan sociopolitical and linguistic context. We then focus on a thematic analysis of data from interviews with deaf signers and teachers about how they experienced and perceived language in education. This revealed that deaf signers see SZJ as the most important building block in their learning process whilst the teachers emphasise hearing as the major factor in learning. The findings clearly point at a discrepancy in sign language ideologies between deaf SZJ users and their teachers resulting in conflicting attitudes and practices in Serbia today. Keywords: Serbian Sign Language, deaf education, language policy, practice, language attitudes