As class registration ends, many students — mostly freshmen and sophomores — are considering how they can fulfill that pesky language requirement. A minimum of two semesters is required by the Carolina Core, and we can choose from a relatively wide array of languages to make that happen. Romance languages and beyond are offered for language credit at USC. But there is one language that you can take that you will get no credit for, although it has all the hallmarks of a language that should earn it.
USC offers two courses in American Sign Language, or ASL — a cumulative eight hours, which would be enough to fulfill the GFL requirement of the Core. However, the bulletin specifies that you may not receive language credit for it — you must simply have the will to spend hundreds of dollars and four class hours a semester on something that does not count towards your degree and therefore does not advance you at the university. Not every student can afford that time and money.
What distinguishes ASL from a language like Spanish? Why can we receive credit for one but not the other?
The argument can be made that ASL is not a “foreign” language — and so of course it can’t fulfill a foreign language requirement — but the definition of “foreign language” gets dicey when the U.S. does not have an official language. More than a fifth of Americans don’t speak English at home, and about a tenth can’t speak it fluently, so for many Americans, English is a foreign language. But we don’t offer English to fill the language requirement. Not to mention that we’re second only to Mexico in Spanish-speaking population — Spain has fallen to fourth place. Can we really keep calling Spanish a “foreign language” when it will be the first language of a projected third of our population by 2050?
Of course, it is true that ASL, unlike Spanish, is used exclusively in America, which makes it less “global” — but using that as the benchmark to disqualify it from language credit would imply that communicating with people of other countries is the exclusive point of the GFL requirement. That is slightly undercut by the fact that Latin and Ancient Greek, both dead languages spoken by no one as his or her mother tongue, do count as GFL courses. It’s hard to imagine that any USC students will ever use their classical language education to communicate with other citizens of the world. So what distinguishes a language like ASL, which lets you speak to hundreds of thousands of Americans, from a language like Latin or Ancient Greek, other than its greater usefulness as a tool of communication?
For starters, it fulfills the GFL requirement as it describes itself, which is that it promotes “global citizenship and multicultural understanding.” Although Latin and Ancient Greek are vital for a classical education and the understanding of various literary, artistic and historical findings, they are unlikely to bring us into any useful cultural harmony with the ancient Greeks and Romans, since they’re all dead.
On the other hand, ASL is the primary language in the American Deaf community, which has exactly the same breadth of culture that surrounds the use of any other language. ASL is not simply signed English — it is its own language, with its own vocabulary and grammatical structure completely separate from English, and Deaf culture has developed alongside it. But most hearing people are completely unaware of it, even though we’re all likely to come in contact with Deaf people at some point in our lives. When we do, many of us will be unable to communicate with them in their language.
The extent of our knowledge of the community mostly extends to the fact that it exists: We all remember Nikki Haley’s sign interpreter, but many of us don’t think much about the people he was employed to inform. An estimated two percent of South Carolinians have some hearing impairment; many of them are simply old and not actually part of the Deaf community that has grown around ASL speakers, but there are still thousands of Deaf people living in this state alongside us. So there’s substantially more multicultural understanding and citizenship to be found in learning ASL than there is in learning Latin or Ancient Greek.
We should not have to go out of our way to learn to interact with a significant culture that lives within our country. Our school should consider at the very least offering GFL credit for taking the ASL courses that are already offered here.
To sweeten the pot for people who are bitter about Saturday, Clemson not only counts ASL as a language, but has an entire program of study that teaches it for degree credit. Are we going to let them beat us at everything?