ASL - American Sign Language

For many, many years I thought, like many, many other people, that Sign Language is an international the same. By now, I know that's a ridiculous idea. When my friend started to work at a kindergarten for children with hearing disabilities, I first got in touch with signing. Together with her I started to learn some useful signs and it got very funny pretty quickly. When we were on a night out we would start to signin in discos. I acutally thought about taking sign language as my second language. But it was not until last week that I really dug in deeper into this matter.

I discovered this new TV-series "switched at birth" where many deaf and hard of hearing people act. One of those Actresses caught my attention and I started researching. Marlee Matlin lost her hearing nearly completley when she was 18 months old. Nonetheless, did she manage to start an acting career. Today she is the first and only deaf Actress to have recieved the Acadamy Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role. Moreover, she acted in more than 15 movies and several Television productions. In her book "I'll scream later" she writes about her interesting life.

Thanks to this TV-series I now found out that in the US there is actually the world wide first, and unfortunately onliest, University for deaf and hard of hearing students. The Gallaudet University in Washington offers both undergraduate and graduate programms. I also tried to find out something about the educational situation for deaf and hard of hearing people in Austria and Germany. But all I could find, was that people in Germany try now already for several years to start a similar University in Bad Kreuznach. Unfornuately they still didn't manage to do that.