Talking Hands: Signing in an Israeli Village

Margalit Fox, a New York Times reporter trained as a linguist, is the only Western journalist to have set foot in the remarkable Bedouin community in Israel where there is an unusually high rate of deafness. Margalit’s book Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals about the Mind (2007) is the outcome of her three-day immersion visit to the village with expert sign linguists. To be allowed into the village as an observer, Margalit had some background in American Sign Language but was under no circumstances to “speak” to anyone during the three days. She was allowed to document but not allowed to contaminate the pure sign language that had evolved in the previous 70 years into a third-generation language. Margalit explored the visit with an analysis of the unique syntactic sign language which was very different from the Israeli Sign Language (ISL), the sign language of the country.

Of Al-Sayyid’s 3,500 residents, about one in 25 is deaf—4% of the population! In Israel and the United States, the incidence of deafness in the general population is about 0.1 percent or one in a 1,000! Unlike in those areas, in Al-Sayyid there is no stigma against being deaf, and because of the high rate of deafness, and because of the remoteness of the village, the rest of the village sees deafness as normal and the majority of hearing villagers are bilingual, signing their local sign language while also speaking Hebrew.

Seventy years ago the first deaf child was born to the community and soon followed by nine more. In this first cohort of deaf children sprouted the pidgin sign which blossomed into the highly communicative local sign language three generations later. However, in the present generation the young deaf children are bussed to a neighboring village to be educated with Israeli Sign Language and linguists are madly trying to document the local sign language that is now  being infiltrated with more and more ISL. Thus, Margalit’s visit with linguists to Al-Sayyid.

Speakers and signers work side by side with almost no job being exclusive for either a speaker or a signer. In fact, the whole village has evolved into a speaking-signing village, but this is not new. From the early 1700s to mid-1900s Martha’s Vineyard had two up-island towns (West Tisbury and Chilmark) where the villagers had so intermarried that their incidences of deafness was one in 49 in Tisbury and one in 25 in Chilmark, just as it is in Al-Sayyid. Also like in Al-Sayyid, signing among all of the townspeople had evolved but was very difficult if not impossible for signing outsiders to understand. Apparently and unique to signing in the United States, Martha’s Vineyard sign language evolved from British Sign Language as 40% of the signs were found to have British cognates while only 22% had overlap with ASL. Martha’s Vineyard sign language was active for about 250 years until islanders started marrying off-islanders, diluting the recessive deaf gene. No deaf signers from Martha’s Vineyard are alive today. Similarly, the demise of the local sign language at Al-Sayyid is expected to rapidly decline, also to marriages outside of the village and with the more globalized education of bussing the young to broader educational opportunities outside of the Al-Sayyid community.

Interesting Points Related to Signing Noted by Margarit Fox

• Al-Sayyid sign language has not evolved differently because of differences related to gender. However, sign language for Dublin’s deaf children was introduced in the mid 1800s by two Dominican nuns but taught in two gender isolated institutions—St. Mary’s School for Deaf Girls and St. Joseph’s School for Deaf Boys. The schools rarely mixed and thus their language evolved radically differently. However, the deaf girls frequently married the deaf boys with the girls learning the dialect of their husbands, making them bilingual Irish Sign Language users. Husbands rarely deigned to learn the dialect of the women as it was viewed as an inferior dialect. With children using the “male” dialect for schooling and interactions, the women’s dialect gradually disappeared.

• In 1917 Thomas Gallaudet and Laurent Clerc opened the Connecticut Asylum for teaching the French version of sign language (the British refused to teach Gallaudet).

• Nicaragua had no widespread education for the deaf until the 1970s. In 1977 a small 50-pupil school was opened and this cohort brought their many home-signs which started a more universal Nicaraguan sign language. The first cohort of students never really attained fluency but they did establish a mean of communication, much like a pidgin language. The second cohort came in 1983 and attached grammar, fluency and syntax to the pidgin, creating a Creole. In the space of just a few years the full-blown Nicaraguan Sign Language had evolved.

• American Sign Language (and perhaps Al-Sayyid Sign Language) evolved into signs for complex words on seemingly an infinite rage and nuance, from compounds to constellations of inflections. As one researchers states, “The existence of such elaborate formal inflectional devices clearly establishes ASL as one of the inflecting languages of the world, like Latin, Russian, and Navajo.”

• Spoonerisms are the reversal of two speech sounds, often with a humorous effect, and were made famous by the Oxford don, Reverend William A. Spooner (1844-1930). Examples:

“the queer old dean”
“noble tons of soil”
“You have hissed all my mystery lecture. I saw you fight a liar in the back quad; in fact, you have tasted the whole worm.” (said to reprimand a student)

Or others not attributed to Spooner:

“Don’t throw your cigarette down, there’s a hire fazard.”
“Who am I to sneeze at a flee runch?”
“We’re having a rot post for dinner.”
“fash and tickle”
“Wing’s babliography”

• Linguists study slips of the tongue to reveal info about language—language structure, language acquisition and historical language change. For signers, slips of the hand can similarly reveal the structure and organization of language.

• Sign language is of “vertical” construction. People can speak faster than they can sign, with the ASL signers producing about two signs per second to typical speakers of English saying about four words per second. However, sign language has “vertical” construction which allows words to be pluralized by a shift in the hand or questions asked by the tilt of the head. In fact, these subtle sign cues make signing easier comparable to spoken English.

• The most commonly word order for spoken languages in the world is SOV, e.g. Japanese and Korean. The local languages of Al-Sayyid are Arabic, a SVO (Standard Arabic is VSO) and Hebrew, also SVO. Israeli Sign Language, however, is relatively free, but the most common orders are SVO and OSV. The local sign language wasn’t specified, but it is modality-driven, has WH-questions tagged on the end, and is clearly a structure consistent language. Imagine that--a language evolving in a mere 70 years!