I chose Martha's Vineyard Shared Sign Language because I was interested in the history of sign language in America. What I found interesting was that some isolated towns around the world had a gene pool similar to that of Martha's Vineyard. The deafness gene is recessive, so you need a gene from both your mother and father to carry the trait, which helps explain their higher rates of deafness. A limited gene pool led to more people carrying the gene, so when they had children, more were deaf. But what I found more interesting was how they treated deaf people like normal people. At the time, the rest of America locked them away in special institutions, but Martha's Vineyard allowed deaf people to be with the rest of the town. They gave them much of the same education as hearing children, simply through signs. This was possible because most of the city's residents understood and were able to sign. Which is cool because there aren't many cities where the entire population is bilingual in the same languages. It really shows that 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 is a bad idea. But the way he executed it was poor because he didn't allow them to continue using the language that was more 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 Should Not 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 teletypewriters. Towards the end, they mentioned that Martha's Vineyard Sign Language was dead, which is unfortunate, but it helped revive other forms of sign language to archive their language. This is promising, because thanks to technological advances, fewer people are at risk of being born deaf (genetic editing) or not learning it at all (cochlear implants). The future of sign language is unclear, but its history is quite interesting.