Luigi:
Hello, Frankie, nice to meet you and welcome to this interview for the Deaf Museums project. Would you like to introduce yourself?
Frankie:
Thank you for inviting me. My name is Frankie, this is my sign name. I work at the EUD as a project manager, which means that I look for projects for EUD, and I manage them within EUD, with the two other staff members.
Luigi:
Within the Deaf Museum's project, all the consortium members are going to develop an exhibition. Have you guys already come up with a title or with a theme?
Frankie:
Yes. It took us a long time to come up with our topic, but we've decided to focus on sign language recognition.
Luigi:
Will this be the only topic that you're focusing on, and do you have a time frame that you'll be looking at?
Frankie:
Well, actually, the reason why we wanted to focus on sign language recognition is because EUD represents all the deaf organizations in the EU.
Many of them have been working very hard on having their national sign languages recognized. So we would like to have an exhibition highlighting that, as well as
the process that many countries went through. I think that would be really interesting to everyone.
We didn't want an exhibition about EUD and how EUD came about. We wanted to focus on national sign languages and we will be focusing on a common theme throughout all of the different sign language recognition processes. Because we have so many materials, what we want to focus on is: Who were the leaders and who were the influencers within each country, getting their sign language recognized.
Within the topic of sign language recognition we could focus on so many things, but that is what we are going to narrow it down to.
Luigi:
Do you think that with the materials that you have, you'll be able to also collect materials from people in and around Europe?
Frankie:
Well actually we have a lot of materials already from the minutes of general assemblies. We also have published books on sign language recognition throughout the EU, so we have a lot of materials already within EUD.
First we're going to be looking at what we already have and then also put a call out to Deaf Associations to see if they have anything that they would like to contribute. We don't think we'll be able to get our hands on everything, but from what we have already have and from what we can collect from the Deaf Associations, we'll see how it unfolds.
Luigi:
The very first country to have their sign language recognized was Finland right in 1988, and the last was Italy just in 2021.
Will that kind of be the time frame you're looking at?
Frankie:
Yes, I think the very first one that was legally recognized was in Finland and indeed the very last was recently, in Italy. The last one left is Switzerland. So maybe with this exhibition we can also support Switzerland and get them to have their sign languages recognized.
Luigi:
Yes, let's hope so. Then once all the sign languages are legally recognized,
Frankie:
We can look at how they are recognized within the law, Whether that needs to be improved or not. But that's a subject for another time.
Luigi:
These sound like very interesting topics within sign language recognition. Good luck with what you're going to produce!
Frankie:
Thank you. Bye.