It enables me to challenge nonsense from sign using (Most actually aren't), campaigners/activists, who claim to have own grammar and an unfinished visual language who spend lives complaining about it never using it to make the point. Perhaps BSL grammar is some sort of deaf 'Esperanto' or something?
English is, funny enough, our national language and enables deaf to be taught how to include themselves, bugger I know given campaigning needs to be based on NOT being included, and would result in 100s of UK 'Deaf' focus group workers looking for a job. 'We need to be seen as persecuted or its a waste of time..' as one sage cultural adherent once told me after 11 pints. I also noticed those complaining those advocating or using English are an elite or cut above them, so respond with BSL videos that you can't follow, ya-boo sucks etc, 'we cannot even print our own grammar', so use English instead.
I am detecting some dissent in the ranks. If I am with this English elite it's time they paid their dues and were a bit more respectful, or I'll join a charity and start patronising them. The curious thing about their claims is they use English to complain about it, indeed 78% of all deaf output online is in the mother tongue (written ENGLISH), and to be fair a lot of deaf are quite adept at using it (Paddy Ladd an exception, his writings are still subject of some debate, ergo to bin? or not to bin? is the question.).
Perhaps it is those weird BSL focus group people? who are struggling to prove they need to reject an English education, in favour of some undeclared and unviable alternative (Because they can). They are unable to succeed since they need to use English to raise their point. It widens English awareness which enables them to demand they shouldn't nor we shouldn't, be using it. I'd ask them to explain the logic but...
Someone cruelly suggests they need to go this way it means lots of work for people who don't rely on sign to demand hearing change their wicked ways and adopt whatever it is they are not using themselves, in case the point it cannot be followed comes out..
We could suggest they have no BSL grammar references for a start. Other than 'Deaf do this or deaf do that' (God knows what hearing are using, perhaps its this awful 'English' or something), which is hardly proof of an academic basis for an unidentifed grammatical base for sign. Taking into account poor educational attainment, I have to admit the deaf have done quite well-attaining levels of English, which is all to the good, I just don't get what their gripe is? English HAS empowered them, and what happened to bilingualism anyway?
So the idea is to what? Reject bilingualism? demand they are taught in whatever they claim is their grammar instead, and then insist mainstream accommodates it? Only last week we saw demands for LESS BSL use and MORE signed English being used, so the deaf majority can more easily access the world outside their own. These grammar demands are unrealistic and holding them back. I blame COVID personally it affects reason in some cases. They will be asking for clear masks for the deaf who cannot lip-read next.