Signed Language Community‐Researcher Collaboration in V iệt N am: Challenging Language Ideologies, Creating Social Change

Examining linguistic practices and description involved in signed language community‐ researcher collaboration in V iệt N am, this article contributes a case supporting analytic efforts to study the ways “people take up literacy for their own purposes” ( B ialostok and W hitman 2006:390). Emerging at the juncture of national speech‐based D eaf education, one signed language–based education project, and D eaf community organizing, these collaborations coalesced in a political climate in which “signs” were construed as a compensatory system for “real” language (Woodward, Nguyễn, and Nguyễn 2004) and as “backward” relative to Vietnamese grammatical structure ( C ooper 2014). Using original ethnographic data, microanalysis of two texts reveals that the ways presenters mobilize stances toward linguistic description and one another accrues legitimacy and authority for D eaf sociolinguistic knowledge and D eaf agency while implicitly challenging prevailing language ideologies and hierarchies. Discussion centers on processes of legitimation of D eaf social voices, language invention/disinvention, interpretation/translation, and the significance of ethnography to the present analysis.