Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language
| Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language | |
|---|---|
| Native to | Israel |
| Region | Negev |
|
Native speakers
|
120–150 deaf (2008) Also used by many of the 3,500 hearing people of the village. Recognized as the local second language. |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
| Glottolog | alsa1242 |
Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL) is a village sign language used by about 150 deaf and many hearing members of the al-Sayyid Bedouin tribe in the Negev desert of southern Israel.
As deafness is so frequent (4% of the population is deaf, compared to 0.1% in the United States) and deaf and hearing people share a language, deaf people are not stigmatised in this community, and marriage between deaf and hearing people is common. There is also no separate Deaf culture or politics.
In 2004, the Al-Sayyid community numbered around 3,000, most of whom trace their ancestry to the time the village was founded, in the mid-19th century, by a local woman and an Egyptian 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 "foreign fellahin". The gene became homozygous in several members of the family.
ABSL was first studied in the end of the 1990s by anthropologist Shifra Kisch and came to worldwide attention in February 2005 when an international group of researchers published a study of the language in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The spontaneous emergence of the language in the last 70 years, which has developed a complex grammar in near-isolation, is of particular interest to linguists for the insights it provides into the birth of human language.
Scholars study ABSL because it is the closest they can come to performing the "forbidden experiment" (a type of language deprivation experiment in which children are isolated before they are exposed to any language so that experimenters may observe their organic formation of a language). Since deaf people in Al-Sayyid cannot hear Arabic or Hebrew and they have not been exposed to any other sign languages, ABSL is a brand new language, uninfluenced by any other. (In the early 1700s, a community similar to that of Al-Sayyid developed on Martha's Vineyard: A new sign language was formed without influence from any other language and was employed by deaf and hearing people alike.) ABSL is in its early stages, so researchers are observing the language as it develops.
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