Conference Program

The paper deals with the neologism Deafhood, coined by the British deaf activist Paddy Ladd (1952–). This concept marks a pivotal shift in discourse on deaf people, reorienting the understanding of deafness from a predominantly medical model to a socio-cultural and identity-based framework. This article offers a contrastive analysis of the English suffixes -hood and -ness and their potential Italian counterparts -ità and -itudine. It investigates the translatability of the term Deafhood into Italian by assessing the viability of sorditudine as a morphologically and semantically appropriate equivalent. Then, from the viewpoint of linguistics there will be examined the capacity of the proposed Italian translation to convey Deaf cultural identity and status in contrast to the clinical notion of sordità (deafness). The theoretical framework discussed hitherto cannot ignore themes such as inclusion and democracy, fundamental cornerstones in the reflection on the relationship between the deaf and hearing communities.