State Language and local Deaf community

Abstract

      The deaf community living in Georgia unites about 2500 people. Deaf people living on the territory of Georgia are a linguistic minority. The communication language of this community members is Georgian Sign Language - GESL. One of the big problems that the members of this community are very worried about is that a large part of the members of this community do not know well or very poorly know the state language - Georgian spoken language. Due to lack of adequate knowledge of the Georgian language, Deaf people avoid written communications even in social networks and prefer to communicate only with each other in GESL. We present the project, the purpose of which is to teach the Georgian language to the Deaf community living in Georgia and to enable the real integration of this community into the civil society. For this, it is necessary to prepare teaching materials of the spoken Georgian language in GESL. In the process of work, of course, the recommendations of the State Language Department and updated norms will be taken into account. Materials of this type, which will be created as a result of the implementation of the project, will be especially valuable and important for deaf schools. Unfortunately, in our country, until now, no valuable educational resources have been created for deaf people to learn the state language. The materials created within the framework of the project will also be used to create Georgian language textbooks for the deaf. Research methodology is directly derived from research goals and objectives. At the first stage, data is collected - the Georgian-language records of the Deaf are collected, then the materials are analyzed and the main issues of agrammatism in this community are identified. The next stage includes the adaptive processing of these issues and the preparation of teaching materials and appropriate linguistic recommendations in Georgian Sign Language. This is, in fact, the first project that will make the state language accessible to the deaf community in Georgia. This type of project has not been implemented in our country, and that is why the language problem and existing agrammatism for the local deaf community are still a serious barrier in the process of civil integration. The relevance of the project stems from this.