Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language

The Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL) is a sign language used by about 150 deaf and many hearing members of a Bedouin community in the Negev desert of southern Israel. 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 2005) numbers around 3500 in total, most of whom trace their ancestry back to the time the village was founded, around 1800, 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 in order to keep the ownership of the land within the family, a common Bedouin custom. This allowed the gene to become homozygous 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 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 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 and Jordanian 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 from State University of New York at Stony Brook, Irit Meir and Wendy Sandler from the University of Haifa and Carol Padden from the University 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 in school, and marriage outside the community is growing, it is unclear whether ABSL will survive.