Eyereading
A colleague once asked me a question in our conversation in late 2007. He asked, "Can you lipread?" First, out of courtesy, I replied to his question and then asked him, "can you eyeread ASL?" He was taken aback. I can understand his curiosity or wonder but I am intrigued by the underlying weave of meanings attached to this question -- the question of colonialism, the sociolinguistic majority versus the minority, logocentrism, the Center and the Other or Margin, etc. (which lead to the structure of social hierarchy).
For the past years, I have been using my own language in response to whenever an English-speaking person talks to me. As an Ameslan-speaking person, they may not understand what I say but they can sometimes eyeread a word or a few onomatopoeic words -- especially the onomatopoeic word "writing" in ASL. Once they realize they could not speak my language, they sometimes go and get their paper and pen, PDA, or their own laptop to talk with me in written English. An approach to this situation is to deconstruct hierarchy or dichotomy and to create complementarity of worlds.