ABSTRACT
In this chapter I have tried to give an overview, intended mainly for those unfamiliar with the deaf community in Britain, of the historical and social conditions under which BSL has developed. The establishment of schools for the deaf and missions to the deaf in the nineteenth century may well have been the first focus for the deaf community, and thus the first opportunity for BSL to begin to develop. BSL has developed as a kind of underground language with considerable social stigma, both because of the attitude in the schools that it was not a proper language, and because of the attitude originating in the missions that, though useful as a kind of crutch to the deaf, it could not be considered on a par with spoken languages unless something was done to improve it. We have seen that both these attitudes have been modified recently with more awareness of the nature of BSL as a language both in and outside the deaf community. At least some of this change of attitude seems to have been informed by the existence and results of linguistic research on BSL, and it is to this that we turn in the next chapter.
