B. van den Bogaerde

Children, Deaf, of Deaf Parents

Deaf children with Deaf parents usually grow up in the Deaf community, that is if their parents offer them a sign language and are active members of the community. These Deaf children are similar to other children of linguistic and cultural minorities in many ways. They are also different in that they cannot, or at least not with the same ease as other minority children, acquire the majority language as a second language. These majority languages are for Deaf people always spoken languages; they are also less (or not) accessible because they cannot be heard, only seen through speechreading or written text. Due to these linguistic modality differences, the culture of the hearing majority is also often difficult to grasp in its finer details. Deaf children of Deaf parents simply by being deaf, are not raised in homogenous households in which the mother tongue is usually dominant, as opposed to their hearing peers. Deaf children of deaf parents are more likely to experience differing linguistic modality permutations in spite of sharing the same family characteristics. Nevertheless, most Deaf children grow up to be bilingual and bicultural, even if to differing degrees.