The Dorothy Miles Cultural Centre (DMCC) is a non-profit making charitable institution, named after Dorothy Miles, poet and pioneer, working with people of all ages. The Centre is committed to enhancing communications and understanding between deaf and hearing people,through social, cultural and educational activities.

These activities include British Sign Language (BSL) tuition, deaf awareness programmes,children's activity days, parent support groups, drama and poetry workshops and various fund-raising events. Future projects include Baby Signing, family sign classes and a Touring Schools Programme introducing BSL through drama. The aim is to bring deaf and hearing people together, and to increase sign language awareness among all parents and teachers of deaf children. Dorothy Miles' vision was of deaf and hearing people learning, developing and working together together.

There are about 9 million people in the UK who are deaf or hard of hearing. Not all of them, however,are members of the "Deaf Community" - people who use BSL as their first preferred language estimated at some 50,000 to 70,000. BSL users may describe themselves as "Deaf" rather than just "deaf", which means they see themselves as part of the Deaf Community.

British Sign Language, now officially recognised as a language in its own right,has its own grammar and syntax, completely different from the grammatical rules of English. It uses manual and non-manual components - hand shapes and movements, facial expression and shoulder movement. Linguists generally agree that BSL is a "topic-comment" language. For example, the question in English "What's your name?" becomes the sequence "Name you what?" in BSL. The topic of the sentence "Name you" comes first, followed by the comment, "what?".

External Links

Dorothy Miles Online