None of this can be true....but....

[Highstool]

I have a new aquaintance. Practically the first time I had an actual conversation with him, he told me how he grew up in another country, but his family had to make a moonlight flit because of their involvement with the mob, when he was 14yo. His uncle eventually went to prison for attempting to murder his father.

This meant his sister had to give up a promising sporting career where she was already competing internationally.

His accent is "correct" for where he lives now because he was deaf until he was in his early 20s, when he had an implant fitted.

He cousin plays for a Premiership FC.

His Grandad is a very famous decorated war hero etc etc

Loads of really far fetched stories, that if they were true, he surely wouldn't have told someone he's only just met.

But it all checks out with stories in mainstream newspapers when you Google.

So is he pretending to be someone else? I just don't know why he'd be telling me!

Family members are not the same as knowing different deaf people from across various parts of the deaf community from different backgrounds.

No need to be rude.

If you sense there is something amiss then you are probably right. We have intuition for a reason, to protect ourselves.

No but, as I said, I have learnt a huge amount about deaf history & culture, including about various different deaf people from various parts of the deaf community from different backgrounds.

Wasn’t my intention to be rude but I just don’t really understand how it’s not obvious to you. Do you think you could go to China tomorrow (assuming you are a UK native), listen to them speak for a few months and pick up everything you need in order to speak fluent Chinese with no hint of a non-native Chinese accent?? Of course you couldn’t! Even if you were there for years and years you might learn enough to become nearly fluent but you’d always have an accent. This man’s situation is even more complicated than that because he never had a first language, which is how you learn language- translating it from your native language. If you have no native language, learning to speak past the “critical period”, which ends around puberty, is insanely difficult. I don’t know why you keep disagreeing with my arguments, when there’s so much evidence to support them. Is it cos you actually think this guy is telling the truth? Or do you just like disagreeing with people for the sake of it?

We recently had a dc in school who was discovered to be deaf in primary 3 (year 2) we had an expert in to talk with us staff working directly with him. We were told the child was unlikely to be a candidate for cochlear implants as it was too late to recover any useful speech and they were pushing sign language as a main form of communication even at that young age

You’re making assumptions about me. Believe me, I know more more people and about them than you ever will.

“I know more more people and about them than you ever will.”

This makes zero sense. If you meant to write “I know more deaf people and about them than you ever will”…how can you possibly know that?! Also, it’s not a competition to see who knows the biggest number of deaf people 🤣

If you’re going to argue a point this obsessively then it might be an idea to back it up with some facts and stats. Do you have any links to any case studies where a deaf person has acquired a non-native language as an adult, after never hearing this language, or any other language, throughout their childhood and early adulthood, and mastered the language so well they were able to speak it without any noticeable “deaf” accent or foreign accent? Nah, didn’t think so

Are you deaf? A member of the deaf community? Work for a deaf organisation? Went to deaf schools or mainstream schools with deaf units? Teach deaf children? Know people who were orally educated?

In your original post you didn’t mention learning a non native language.

All of that is completely irrelevant if you can’t back up your point with any hard evidence.

The OP has said that this man is from another country and grew up where a different language was spoken, then moved here and got an implant and started speaking like a native English speaker. But the fact he grew up surrounded by a different language is irrelevant anyway if he was deaf. It would be the same if he grew up here being deaf then got an implant and suddenly started speaking like a hearing person.

If you are so involved in the deaf community like you claim, and believe it is in fact possible to spend your childhood and early adulthood completely deaf, then get an implant as an adult and start speaking exactly like a hearing person, without years of intensive speech therapy, you must have some examples of other people doing this? Considering the amount of deaf people you know and have taught? Why haven’t you given any examples if you know this to be true?

Why do people think that talking about interesting family history is boastful? I was not raised in the UK but find this (very middle class and dull) aspect of the culture hideous. I am not saying people should be loudly screeching about the wonders of their family but if I met someone who had a fascinating past and they didn’t talk about it ever, I would think there is something wrong with them!

I was clear in my first reply that it’s possible with speech therapy - I know quite a few profoundly deaf people who have succeeded with or without implants but they had speech therapy growing up.

Have a look at the Elizabeth Foundation and Auditory Verbal websites to see how this could be done with some children.