{"id":331,"date":"2022-07-20T07:27:14","date_gmt":"2022-07-20T07:27:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mpelembe.net\/?p=331"},"modified":"2022-07-20T07:28:03","modified_gmt":"2022-07-20T07:28:03","slug":"love-islands-tasha-is-the-shows-first-deaf-contestant-heres-what-you-should-know-about-deaf-accents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mpelembe.net\/index.php\/love-islands-tasha-is-the-shows-first-deaf-contestant-heres-what-you-should-know-about-deaf-accents\/","title":{"rendered":"Love Island\u2019s Tasha is the show\u2019s first deaf contestant \u2013 here\u2019s what you should know about deaf\u00a0accents"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kate Rowley<\/a>, UCL<\/a><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

I sat down to watch the first episode of this year\u2019s Love Island with my daughter as I was told that there was a deaf contestant appearing on the show. I don\u2019t usually watch Love Island, but as a deaf person I was intrigued to find out more about how this contestant, Tasha Ghouri, would handle being the only deaf person on the show. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I asked my daughter, who is hearing, whether or not she could hear that Ghouri was deaf \u2013 she seemed to be communicating with her hearing peers with complete ease. My daughter replied: \u201cI can hear the deaf in her voice.\u201d This was not surprising, as several members of my family are deaf and I socialise mainly with deaf people. My daughter is highly familiar with what we, deaf people, call, \u201cdeaf accent\u201d, also known to researchers as \u201cdeaf speech\u201d. <\/p>\n

Sadly, a few weeks into the show, there has been a wave of online trolling and abuse directed at Ghouri<\/a>. Much of this has focused on her cochlear implant \u2013 an electronic device that allow some deaf people to hear and process speech (this varies greatly among deaf people) \u2013 and her accent.<\/p>\n

An accent refers to people\u2019s voice quality, intonation and their pronunciation of both vowels and consonants. In general, people tend to have an accent when speaking that reflects their gender, ethnicity, social class, age and their region or country of origin (among other factors). Other linguistic differences in vocabulary and grammar are known as dialects, and relate to the same social factors as accents. <\/p>\n

Accents may also indicate that a person has a disability, including deaf people. \u201cDeaf accent\u201d occurs because deaf people are often unable to hear the full range of sounds that hearing people hear. This means that they are not always able to replicate the full range of sounds in spoken words. Speech also has various tones or intonation patterns that deaf people may also be unable to hear, thus they do not replicate those. There is a high degree of variability in deaf accents simply because every deaf person is different, with some who are mildly deaf and others who are profoundly deaf. <\/p>\n

Quite often, deaf people undergo speech therapy (whether they want to or not) during their school years to learn how to pronounce sounds and words they\u2019re unable to hear. Many deaf people have quite negative experiences<\/a> of speech therapy. For deaf people, learning to speak and using speech can be quite a conscious and laborious process. <\/p>\n

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