I sat down to watch the first episode of this year’s Love Island with my daughter as I was told that there was a deaf contestant appearing on the show. I don’t usually watch Love Island, but as a deaf person I was intrigued to find out more about how this contestant, Tasha Ghouri, would handle being the only deaf person on the show.
I asked my daughter, who is hearing, whether or not she could hear that Ghouri was deaf – she seemed to be communicating with her hearing peers with complete ease. My daughter replied: “I can hear the deaf in her voice.” This was not surprising, as several members of my family are deaf and I socialise mainly with deaf people. My daughter is highly familiar with what we, deaf people, call, “deaf accent”, also known to researchers as “deaf speech”.
