A Community Which Opens Language Barriers…

by Willow Skidmore

PHS Press staff member 

Martha’s Vineyard is an island off the coast of Massachusetts where most of the population is deaf or culturally deaf (which means hard of hearing). About.com says that the first recorded deaf person on Martha’s Vineyard was Jonathan Lambert in 1692. He and his family came from England and established the first English settlement on Martha’s Vineyard. Lambert had seven children, two of whom were deaf.

Many of the early settlers carried a gene for deafness. This gene started with Lambert’s family and two other families: The Tiltons and the Skiffes. They created Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language, which later mixed with French Sign Language to create American Sign Language. At one point, one in every four children on Martha’s Vineyard was deaf .

History Collections tells us that Alexander Graham Bell noted the large amount of deafness on Martha’s Vineyard in the late Nineteenth Century after visiting the island. Previously, people believed  that “maternal fright” was the explanation for this phenomenon. The theory of “maternal fright” was an effect on the baby from psychological stress on the mother during pregnancy. Bell thought about this and believed that the deafness was hereditary. In the Nineteenth Century in America, one in every 5,728 people was deaf, while on Martha’s Vineyard, one in every twenty-five people was deaf.  Hearing people then and now communicate using sign language while on the island. According to History Collections, that is why the people of Martha’s Vineyard do not consider themselves a “deaf community,” but “a community which opens language barriers.”