I chose The Shared Sign Language of Martha's Vineyard because I was interested in the history of Sign Language in America. What I found interesting was that some isolated cities around the world had a similar gene pool to Martha's Vineyard. The deaf gene is recessive, so you need one from your mother and father to carry the trait, which helped explain their higher rates of deafness. The limited gene pool leads to more people carrying the gene, so when they had children many more were deaf. But what I found most interesting was the way they treated deaf people like normal people. The rest of America at the time placed them in special institutions, but Martha's Vineyard allowed deaf people to be with the rest of the city. They gave them much the same education as hearing children, but only through signs. This was possible because most of the city understood and were able to sign. Which is nice because there aren't many cities where the entire population is bilingual in the same languages. This really shows this care and desire to understand those who were different from the rest of the hearing world. They mentioned Graham Bell's approach to deaf people and how he wanted to integrate them into society, which I honestly don't think was a bad idea. But the way he did it was poor because it didn't allow them to continue using the language that was most natural to them. Reading lips and learning to speak was especially useful at the time due to the lack of the Internet. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Fortunately, we have video calls that help deaf people connect with those on the other side of the world, in a much better way than ticker writers. Towards the end they mentioned how Martha's Vineyard Sign Language is dead, which is unfortunate, but it helped start other forms of sign language to archive their language. This is promising because as technology advances, fewer people may be born deaf (gene editing) or simply not learn it at all (cochlear implants). The future of sign language is blurry, but the history is quite interesting.