Indian Sign Language

Indian Sign Language (ISL) or Indo-Pakistani Sign Language (IPSL) is possibly the predominant sign language variety in South Asia, used by at least several hundred thousand deaf signers (2003). As with many sign languages, it is difficult to estimate numbers with any certainty, as the Census of India does not list sign languages and most studies have focused on the north and on urban areas.

The Indian deaf population of 3.1 million is 98% illiterate. In line with oralist philosophy, deaf schools attempt early intervention with hearing aids etc, but these are largely dysfunctional in an impoverished society. As of 1986, only 2% of deaf children attended school.

Status of sign language
Deaf schools in the region are overwhelmingly oralist in their approach.

Since 2001, a group at the Ali Yavar Jung National Institute for the Hearing Handicapped (AYJNIHH) has been working on providing teaching material and training teachers for ISL. The Rehabilitation Council of India and the Ishara Foundation are also involved in ISL training, English through ISL, and interpreter training. A number of vocational schools, e.g. ITI Secunderabad use ISL for teaching. Other institutes such as the All India Institute of Speech and Hearing remain exclusively focused on oralism.

In 2005, India the National Curricular Framework (NCF) gave some degree of legitimacy to sign language education, by hinting that sign languages may qualify as an optional third language choice for hearing students. NCERT in March 2006 launched a class III text includes a chapter on sign language, empasizing the fact that it is a language like any other and is “yet another mode of communication." The aim was to create healthy attitudes towards the differently abled.

Dialects and language families
There are many varieties of sign language in the region, including many pockets of home sign and informal sign languages. There is no consensus regarding which of these varieties constitute dialects of a language or separate languages, but several researchers have identified relatedness between the sign languages used in urban regions of India, Pakistan and Nepal. It is unknown whether this group is related to other languages of the subcontinent such as sign languages in Bangladesh or Sri Lanka.

Ethnologue.com claims that sign languages across urban India appear to share about 75% of their vocabularies, and that the Mumbai-Delhi dialect is the most influential. Ethnologue identifies the following regional dialects within India:
 * Mumbai-Delhi Sign Language (or separately: Delhi Sign Language, Bombay Sign Language)
 * Calcutta Sign Language
 * Bangalore-Madras Sign Language (or Bangalore-Chennai-Hyderabad Sign Language)

While the sign system in ISL appears to be largely indigenous, elements in ISL are derived from British Sign Language; for example, ISL does not have signs for the Devanāgarī script, and fingerspelling is based on the Latin alphabet. In addition, a small number of the Deaf near Bangalore sign American Sign Language owing to a longstanding ASL deaf school there.

The Delhi Association for the Deaf is reportedly working with Jawaharlal Nehru University to identify a standard sign language for India.

Early history
Although discussion of sign languages and the lives of deaf people is extremely rare in the history of South Asian literature, there are a few references to deaf people and gestural communication in texts dating from antiquity. Symbolic hand gestures known as mudras have been employed in religious contexts in Hinduism, Buddhism and Zoroastrianism for many centuries, although these religious traditions have often excluded deaf people from participation in ritual or religious membership. In addition, classical Indian dance and theatre often employs stylised hand gestures with particular meanings.

An early reference to gestures used by deaf people for communication appears in a 12th century Islamic legal commentary, the Hidayah. In the influential text, deaf (or "dumb") people have legal standing in areas such as bequests, marriage, divorce and financial transactions, if they communicate habitually with intelligble signs.

Early in the 20th century, a high incidence of deafness was observed among communities of the Naga hills. As has happened elsewhere in such circumstances (see, for example, Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language), a sign language had emerged and was used by both deaf and hearing members of the community. Ethnologist and political officer John Henry Hutton wrote:

"As one might expect ... of men without the art of writing, the language of signs has reached a high state of development... To judge how highly developed is this power of communicating by signs, etc., it is necessary only to experience a Naga interpreter's translation of a story or a request told to him in sign language by a dumb man. ... Indeed the writer has known a dumb man make a long and detailed complaint of an assault in which nothing was missing except proper names, and even these were eventually identified by means of the dumb man's description of his assailants' dress and personal appearance."

However, it is unlikely that any of these sign systems are related to modern IPSL, and deaf people were largely treated as social outcasts throughout South Asian history.

Residential deaf schools
Documented deaf education began with welfare services, mission schools and orphanages from the 1830s, and "initially worked with locally-devised gestural or signed communication, sometimes with simultaneous speech." Later in the 19th century, residential deaf shools were established, and they tended (increasingly) to adopt an oralist approach over the use of sign language in the classroom. These schools included The Bombay Institution for Deaf-Mutes, which was founded by Bishop Meurin in the 1880s, and schools in Madras and Calcutta which opened in the 1890s. Other residential schools soon followed, such as the "School for Deaf and Dumb Boys" at Mysore, founded in 1902, a school in Dehiwala in what is now Sri Lanka, founded in 1913, and "The Ida Rieu School for blind, deaf, dumb and other defective children", founded in 1923 in Karachi, in what is now Pakistan.

While a few students who were unable to learn via the oralist method were taught with signs, many students preferred to communicate with each other via sign language, sometimes to the frustration of their teachers. The first study of the sign language of these children, which is almost certainly related to modern IPSL, was in 1928 by British teacher H. C. Banerjee. She visited three residential schools for deaf children, at Dacca, Barisal and Calcutta, observing that "in all these schools the teachers have discouraged the growth of the sign language, which in spite of this official disapproval, has grown and flourished." She compared sign vocabularies at the different schools and described the signs in words in an appendix.

A rare case of a public event conducted in sign language was reported by a mission in Palayamkottai in 1906: "Our services for the Deaf are chiefly in the sign language, in which all can join alike, whether learning Tamil, as those do who belong to the Madras Presidency, or English, which is taught to those coming from other parts."

Grammar
IPSL shares grammatical features with many other deaf sign languages, including the use of space and simultaneity and the five meaningful parameters of handshape, location, orientation, movement and non-manual features such as body position, head movement and facial expression. Some specifics are described by sign language linguist Ulrike Zeshan in her study of IPSL grammar:

Sentences are always predicate final, and all of the signs from the open lexical classes can function as predicates. Ellipsis is extensive, and one-word sentences are common. There is a strong preference for sentences with only one lexical argument. Constituent order does not play any role in the marking of grammatical relations. These are coded exclusively by spatial mechanisms (e.g., directional signs) or inferred from the context. Temporal expressions usually come first in the sentence, and if there is a functional particle, it always follows the predicate (e.g., YESTERDAY FATHER DIE COMPLETIVE — "(My) father died yesterday").

Popular culture
Indian Sign language has appeared in numerous Indian films such as:


 * Koshish, 1972 film about a deaf couple.
 * Mozhi, 2007 film about the love story of a deaf and mute girl
 * Khamoshi: The Musical, a 1996 film about deaf and mute parents with a daughter who can hear
 * Black, a 2005 film about a blind and deaf girl