Linguists study sign language -- and a new book desribes an actual village where everyone uses a unique sign language, as their primary day-to-day language. Quoting a book review, from today's Wall Street Journal, which is available free to all, at least for today.

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In the southern Israeli desert of Negev lies a community called Al-Sayyid. Inhabited by approximately 3,500 Bedouin that settled the area about 200 years ago, the village may seem rather humdrum at first glance. That is, until you see the villagers interacting -- by making signs with their hands.

In Al-Sayyid, at least 150 residents are deaf, a rate 50 times greater than that of Israel's general population. As it happens, a recessive gene for profound deafness has made its way into an ever-widening gene pool. Thus over three generations an extraordinarily high number of deaf children have been born to Al-Sayyid's villagers.

Of necessity, a special means of communication has sprung up: Nearly all the village's residents, hearing and deaf alike, are fluent in a sign language unique to Al-Sayyid. Margalit Fox's "Talking Hands," in part, describes this language and chronicles the work of a group of linguists who were allowed by townspeople to study it. Though rare, such "signing villages" are not unheard of. [There was one in Martha's Vineyard, whose last member died around 1955.]

Linguists now believe that sign languages are processed in our minds in much the way that spoken languages are -- and follow a similar evolutionary pattern. (This similarity is one reason why the study of sign languages is a growing subfield in linguistics.) The third generation of signers in Al-Sayyid uses its language with much greater speed than the first and with much greater structural complexity. Spoken language shows a kindred evolution.

What is so fascinating about Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL), as the village's sign language is officially called, is that it was born with no apparent influence from any language at all. A case in point: The spoken languages of the region -- Hebrew and the local Arabic dialect -- favor sentences with a subject-verb-object sequence. (English does too.) ABSL favors subject-object-verb.

A close look at a young language -- tracing its structure and developmental arc -- is rarely possible in the modern age. Hence the appeal of studying ABSL. The language may well give scholars special insight into the workings of the mind and the intricacies of its linguistic faculties. There are other signing villages in the world today, but none with languages so fully developed as Al-Sayyid's.

Unfortunately, there isn't much time. Israeli Sign Language (ISL) -- an entirely different language -- threatens to encroach on ABSL. Over time, it is unclear whether older residents, nurtured on a purer form of ABSL, will understand the younger ones. For now, at least, a unique sign language integrates everyone into a single community, whether they can hear or not.

It's so interesting that this particular sign language has no apparent influence from any language, particularly from those languages spoken in the region. I always thought sign language was directly derived from the spoken language. Sign language in the U.S., for example, is derived from English, isn't it?

What a great disseration for a linguistics student studying the evolution of language!

Sign language in the U.S., for example, is derived from English, isn't it?

Well, it depends which sign language you're talking about. There's Signed Exact English which is basically just English with spoken words replaced by signs: same grammar. Then there's American Sign Language which is a rather different language than English. I've posted about this before in a different thread.

quote:

ASL is a natural language as proved to the satisfaction of the linguistic community by William Stokoe, and contains phonology, morphology, semantics, syntax and pragmatics just like spoken languages. It is a manual language or visual language, meaning that the information is expressed not with combinations of sounds but with combinations of handshapes, palm orientations, movements of the hands, arms and body, location in relation to the body, and facial expressions. While spoken languages are produced by the vocal cords only, and can thus be easily written in linear patterns, ASL uses the hands, head and body, with constantly changing movements and orientations. Like other natural sign languages, it is "three dimensional" in this sense. ASL is used natively and predominantly by the Deaf and hard-of-hearing of the United States and Canada.

[Wikipedia article on ASL (accessed on 26 August 2007, 07:42 PDT).]

This and more on Stockoe at Gallaudet University Press website.

Thanks for that information, z. I am sorry I didn't remember the previous posts on this. We talk about so much here that sometimes it takes a few threads for linguistic information to sink into my hard little head. I'm getting better, though!