- Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language
Infobox Language
name=Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language
states=Israel
region=Negev
familycolor=sign language
signers=150 deaf signers, many more hearing signers
notice=nonoticeThe Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL) is asign language used by about 150deaf and many hearing members of theal-Sayyid Bedouin tribe in the Negev desert of southernIsrael . As both deaf and hearing people share a language, deaf people are not stigmatised in this community, and marriage between deaf and hearing people is common.The Al-Sayyid community (as of
2004 ) numbers around 3,000 in total, most of whom trace their ancestry back to the time the village was founded, in the mid 1800s, by a local woman and anEgypt ian man. Two of this founding couple's five sons carried a gene for nonsyndromic, genetically recessive, profound pre-lingual neurosensory deafness. The descendants of the founding couple often married their cousins due to the tribe's rejection by its neighbours for being "foreignfellah in". [ [http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=434665 One in Twenty] Haaretz, 2 June 2004] This meant that the gene becamehomozygous in several members of the family.ABSL came to worldwide attention in February
2005 when an international group of researchers published a study of the language in theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . The spontaneous emergence of the language in the last 70 years, which has developed a complex grammar without influence from any other language, is of particular interest to linguists for the insights it provides into the birth of human language.ABSL shows a preference for
Subject Object Verb word order (e.g. "WOMAN CHILD FEED"), in marked contrast to the dialect of Arabic spoken by hearing members of the community (SVO), as well as Hebrew (SVO), classical Arabic (VSO), and the predominant sign languages in the region,Israeli Sign Language andJordanian Sign Language . The authors of the study see ABSL as evidence for the human tendency to construct communication along grammatical lines.Authors of the study (
Mark Aronoff fromState University of New York at Stony Brook , Irit Meir and Wendy Sandler from theUniversity of Haifa andCarol Padden from theUniversity of California, San Diego ) also remarked on the speed with which a grammar emerged, with the SOV word-order emerging with the first generation of signers, as well as the language's continuing rapid development — the third generation is signing twice as fast as the first and is using longer sentences.Because many of the younger generation are now exposed to Israeli Sign Language and Jordanian Sign Language in school, and marriage outside the community is growing, it is unclear whether ABSL will survive.
ee also
*
Adamorobe Sign Language
*Nicaraguan Sign Language (ISN), another language which emerged in recent years which has excited linguists outside the specialised field of sign language research. However, ABSL is considered to reflect a more natural emergence of a language from a stable community, unlike ISN which evolved in a school setting.
*Language acquisition device References
External links
* [http://sandlersignlab.haifa.ac.il/html/html_eng/al_sayyid.html Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language] Sign Language Research Laboratory, University of Haifa
*Sandler W, Meir I, Padden C, Aronoff M. (2005) " [http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/0405448102v1?ct The emergence of grammar: systematic structure in a new language] ", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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