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The first chocolate Easter eggs would've tasted pretty awful by today's standards and also been very expensive.Ìý They weren't something you gave to the whole family.Ìý It wasn't until the price of chocolate started falling that a mass market emerged.Ìý From the 1950s there was an explosion in the market as packaging improved so fragile Easter eggs could be transported more easily.

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By the 1960s ideas were changing, women and black people were demanding their rights and people started to challenge the authorities.Ìý Deaf people started to fight for their language and politics returned to the deaf world.ÌýÌý For example, in 1971 the BDDA dropped 'Dumb' from its title to make it the British Deaf Association.Ìý

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It was 1974 that marked the 2^nd biggest change in the history of sign language at Moray House in Scotland.Ìý A research project by Dr Mary Brennan, linguist and principal investigator; zoologist Lilian Lawson, herself profoundly deaf from birth; and Martin Colville, born hearing to deaf parents, identified grammatical rules in BSL, which proved that it was a real language in its own right.

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At that time there was no information about sign language.Ìý Bill Stokoe and others had done some research in America as had some people in Sweden and Denmark, but sign language was still seen as gesture and not as a real language.Ìý Mary Brennan believed that sign language must be a real language as deaf people could converse in it.ÌýÌý

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Lilian Lawson contacted deaf clubs for the names of deaf people who'd grown up in deaf families as BSL would be their first language.Ìý Then meeting them in groups at various deaf clubs in Scotland she gave them a subject to 'talk' about and filmed it for her research.Ìý During the research she came across a number of signs that had no translatable equivalent in English.Ìý There was a lot of debate between Lilian, Mary and Martin about how to translate these signs.Ìý It was renamed British Sign Language to differentiate it from sign language in other countries around the world.ÌýÌý

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This news had a real impact on the deaf community as deaf people started to train as Sign Language tutors.Ìý In the 1980s the BDA in conjunction with DurhamUniversity set up the BSLTA course to train Deaf people to become sign-language tutors, which brought a new pride in the language.Ìý The status of sign language started to grow and by 1978 ExeterSchool adopted Total Communication.Ìý The BDA also campaigned for Total Communication - ironically the same method as used at Braidwood centuries before.Ìý Sign language returned to the classroom along with the deaf teachers who had a new found confidence.

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The last phase of sign language's history has been the battle for its legal recognition.Ìý Deaf people took the campaign to the streets in 1999 with the first BSL march.Ìý In 2003 the British government accepted that BSL is a language in its own right and should be recognised as such.ÌýÌýÌý Sign language has evolved over the past 500 years, despite being oppressed and driven underground.Ìý It has been kept alive through the deaf community.Ìý

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