Editing Martha's Vineyard Sign Language (section)

===Origins===
[[File:Martha's Vineyard Sign Language (MSVL) of the past.ogv|thumb|Lecture on the history of Martha's Vineyard Sign Language by Joan Poole-Nash]]

Hereditary deafness had appeared on Martha's Vineyard by 1714. The ancestry of most of the deaf population of Martha's Vineyard can be traced to a forested area in the south of England known as [[Weald|the Weald]]—specifically the part of the Weald in the county of [[Kent]].<ref name="library" /> Martha's Vineyard Sign Language (MVSL) may be descended from a hypothesized sign language of that area in the 16th century, now referred to as [[Old Kent Sign Language]]. Families from a [[Puritan]] community in the Kentish Weald emigrated to the [[Massachusetts Bay Colony]] in [[British America]] in the early 17th century, and many of their descendants later settled on Martha's Vineyard. The first deaf person known to have settled there was Jonathan Lambert, a carpenter and farmer, who moved there with his wife—who was not deaf—in 1694. By 1710, the migration had virtually ceased, and the [[endogamous]] community that was created contained a high incidence of hereditary deafness that persisted for over 200 years.{{cn|date=January 2025}}

In the town of [[Chilmark, Massachusetts|Chilmark]], which had the highest concentration of deaf people on the island, the average was 1 in 25; at one point, in a section of Chilmark called Squibnocket, as much as 1 in 4 of the population of 60 was deaf.<ref name="library" /> By the 18th century there was a distinct [[Chilmark Sign Language]]. In the 19th century, this was influenced by [[French Sign Language]], and evolved into MVSL in the 19th and 20th centuries. From the late 18th to the early 20th century, virtually everybody on Martha's Vineyard possessed some degree of fluency in the language.{{cn|date=January 2025}}

Although the people who were dependent on MVSL were different, they still did the same activities as the typical Martha's Vineyard resident would. Deaf people would work both complex and simple jobs, attend island events, and participate within the community. In contrast to some other deaf communities around the world, they were treated as typical people. Deaf people living in rural Mexico have a similar community, but few hearing people live there permanently.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Dehn |first=Georgia |year=2015 |title=Signs of Life |journal=Daily Telegraph }}</ref> Other deaf communities are often isolated from the hearing population; the Martha's Vineyard deaf community of that period is exceptional in its integration into the general population.<ref name=Groce1985></ref>

Deaf MVSL users were not excluded by the rest of society at Martha's Vineyard, but they certainly faced challenges due to their deafness. Marriage between a deaf person and a hearing person was extremely difficult to maintain, even though both could use MVSL. For this reason, the deaf usually married the deaf, raising the degree of inbreeding even beyond that of the general population of Martha's Vineyard.<ref>{{Cite journal |last= Perlmutter |first=David |year=1986 |title=No Nearer to the Soul |jstor= 4047641 |journal= Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 	 |volume=4|issue=4 |pages=515–23  |doi=10.1007/bf00134471|s2cid=189902060 }}</ref> This high rate of deaf–deaf marriages increased the deaf population within the community over time, as all offspring of such couples inherited their parents' shared recessive deafness trait and were also congenitally deaf.<ref name=":12">{{Cite journal |last=Kusters |first=A. |date=2010-01-01 |title=Deaf Utopias? Reviewing the Sociocultural Literature on the World's "Martha's Vineyard Situations" |url=https://academic.oup.com/jdsde/article/15/1/3/408844/Deaf-Utopias-Reviewing-the-Sociocultural |journal=Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education |language=en |volume=15 |issue=1 |pages=3–16 |doi=10.1093/deafed/enp026 |pmid=19812282 |issn=1081-4159 |doi-access=free |access-date=2017-04-26 |archive-date=2017-04-27 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170427014236/https://academic.oup.com/jdsde/article/15/1/3/408844/Deaf-Utopias-Reviewing-the-Sociocultural |url-status=live }}</ref> The MVSL users often associated closely, helping and working with each other to overcome other issues caused by deafness. They entertained at community events, teaching hearing youngsters more MVSL. The sign language was spoken and taught to hearing children as early as their first years to help them communicate with the many deaf people they would encounter in school.<ref name=":22">{{Cite news |last=Kageleiry |first=Jamie |date=March 1999 |title=The Island That Spoke by Hand |volume=63 |pages=48 |work=Yankee}}</ref> [[Nonmanual feature|Non-manual markers]], such as lip movement and facial expressions as well as hand gestures and mannerisms were all studied.<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Comstock |first=Nancy|year=2016 |title=Deaf Culture |journal= Salem Press Encyclopedia }}</ref> There were even separate schools specifically for learning MVSL.<ref>{{Cite news |jstor= 44065463|title=The Marthas Vineyard Summer School |work=Journal of Education }}</ref> Hearing people sometimes signed even when there were no deaf people present. For example, children signed behind a schoolteacher's back, adults signed to one another during church sermons, farmers signed to their children across a wide field, and fishermen signed to each other from their boats across the water where the spoken word would not carry.<ref name="Groce1985" />