The Polish language as a value or a necessity? The image of the Polish language contained in the collected corpus of utterances of the D/deaf

Abstract

In the proposed text, I will pay attention to the status of the Polish language as a means of communication for the D/deaf community in Poland, trying to answer the question of how they perceive the Polish language. Analyzing texts written on social media for the D/deaf, I will show the ways of perceiving Polish from an emic perspective (the deaf community itself), and pay attention to the resulting axiological dimension. The title question about the value or necessity is a point of departure to consider whether value is/can be something that is a necessity, an imposed (most often by people from outside the Deaf community) way of communication, and what that value might then be. The analytical corpus consists of 50 written survey answers of adult d/Deaf people (29 women and 21 men from different parts of Poland, living both in the countryside and in the city) aged 18 to 41 years, which were collected by the author in the period from October 2015 to January 2017. This group included people identifying culturally with the Deaf community, who knew Polish Sign Language (PJM) very well, as well as deaf people who did not know sign language. The group of respondents was also diverse in terms of the educational paths they had taken – some people attended state schools, while others, schools for the deaf and hard of hearing.