The page 99 test suggests that the core of a text might be found on one of its pages. After I submitted my dissertation to MIT Libraries and turned to page 99, I had to laugh. Page 99 falls smack dab in the middle of chapter two of my dissertation, which examines deaf Jordanians’ engagements with new assistive technologies that have emerged in Amman in the last two decades and the biomedical imaginaries, language ideologies, and religious commitments that shaped these engagements. During my fieldwork from 2021 to 2023, I focused on the cochlear implant—a medical device implanted via surgery that provides its users with electronic access to sound, distributed to eligible deaf Jordanians through a state-affiliated initiative beginning in 2014—and a sign language-centered mobile application—designed by young Arab entrepreneurs in 2019 in conjunction with vocabulary cards to improve literacy among deaf children. That page 99 is in chapter two feels particularly apt because it was the first chapter I began writing while I was still in the middle of doing fieldwork, when I was not yet sure if I had a dissertation in me.

Chapter two examines two contrasting characterizations of Jordanian Sign Language (LIU, from the Arabic lughat al-’ishara al-’urduniyya) among my deaf and hearing interlocutors as either the mother tongue (al-lugha al-’umm) of deaf children or as a kind of broken Arabic (‘arabi mukassar). I move beyond characterizing these discourses as either supposedly positive or negative to argue that they should be understood as forms of rhetoric that must be analyzed in the contexts in which they are strategically deployed. Very early drafts were workshopped with very supportive audiences—as I hope my work will always be!—at the Language and Technology Lab at MIT and the Graduate Student Research Workshop at NYU Abu Dhabi, and a much more polished version went on to win the 2023 Gumperz Prize from the Society for Linguistic Anthropology. Page 99, in particular, situates the discourse of “LIU as mother tongue” within academic scholarship on language deprivation that has proliferated among researchers of deafness in recent years (psychologists, linguists, cognitive scientists, and others in addition to anthropologists) which names the phenomenon that many deaf children around the globe, especially those given hearing technologies like cochlear implants, are not getting access to normative forms of language and are experiencing the consequences of such deprivation. Because this is happening in Jordan as well, calling LIU “al-lugha al-’umm” in some ways obscures the dismal status quo, which is that many deaf children in Jordan do not in fact have access to the language. In this part of the chapter, then, I wanted to think about the stakes of labeling sign language as a mother tongue (as I also do here and forthcoming in American Anthropologist) and to call attention to considering how we frame why deaf children need access to sign language.

With its explicit focus on language ideologies, this chapter is a microcosm of the larger dissertation, a central theme of which is how ideas, beliefs, and practices around language shape how assistive technologies for deaf Jordanians are used and produced. At its core, it became a study of language in culture (as pointed out by my advisor) in a way that I did not expect until I had the final product in my hands. It strikes me as funny because, when I first began doctoral study at MIT in 2018, I thought I had left linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics (which I had studied as an undergraduate) behind and was going to work only in medical anthropology and science and technology studies. But language—sign and spoken—kept returning in my fieldwork, both as ethnographic concern and theoretical concept and, as it happens, I now situate my research primarily at the intersection of those three (sub)fields. I have never been happier to have been so wrong.

Loh, Timothy Y. 2024. “Entanglements of Language, Religion, and Disability: The Politics of Assistive Technologies for Deaf People in Jordan.” Ph.D. diss., Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.