PAST the glimmering industrial developments and fast food chains of the northern Negev desert in Israel, I pull off the dusty highway into the quiet village of Al-Sayyid. A family of 22 awaits me outside their home, greeting me with sage tea. The children introduce me to the family pets: a horse, a brood of chickens and a camel. Meanwhile, the head of the household, Ishak al-Sayyid, recounts his family’s history, shifting between Arabic, Hebrew and a language I don’t understand.
Ishak’s family have lived here for generations. They are members of the Al-Sayyid Bedouin tribe, founded 200 years ago by an Egyptian peasant who moved here after a family feud then married several local women. Shaykh al-Sayyid’s children married among themselves after being rejected as outsiders by neighbouring tribes. What they did not know was that two of them carried a recessive gene for congenital deafness.
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Intermarriage became the norm in the village, and the gene spread. The first deaf children were born in the 1930s. At first it was just one family, with four deaf siblings among many hearing ones. But soon other families started having deaf children too. Today the village has the highest known rate of congenital deafness in the world. Around 150 of 4000 residents were born deaf, 50 times the global average. Three of Ishak’s own children are deaf.
Deafness also accounts for what really puts Al-Sayyid on the map. Over the past 75 years, the villagers have created an entirely new and unique language, Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL). The seeds emerged spontaneously among the first deaf residents and, three generations later, it has flowered into a complex language capable of expressing anything a spoken one can.
Since its discovery by linguists in 2000, ABSL has captivated researchers driven by two fundamental questions: how did language emerge, and what can that tell us about the nature of the human mind?
More than 15 years and hundreds of hours of video footage later, those researchers have documented a remarkable language that casts serious doubts on some long-standing linguistic theories. But even as they decipher ABSL’s secrets, it is in danger of dying out.
Forbidden experiment
The origins of language have always fascinated us. Around 3000 years ago, the Egyptian pharaoh Psammetichus was said to have plucked twin infants from their mother and turned them over to be raised in isolation by a shepherd who was forbidden from speaking in their presence. The idea was that whatever words the babies produced would reveal the original, primal form of human language.
Linguists refer to this as the “forbidden experiment”. Obviously they cannot replicate it, but sign languages like ABSL offer something very similar.
ABSL is classed as a “village sign”, a type of language that often emerges in isolated communities with large numbers of deaf people. One of the earliest known arose in the 18th century on Martha’s Vineyard, an island off Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The language was widely shared by both deaf and hearing people, but rose and fell without being formally documented.
Today at least 24 village sign languages exist across the globe. They usually start life as a “home sign” – a set of rudimentary gestures invented by two or three people in the same household. But in the hands of a community of deaf people, they can rapidly evolve into fully fledged languages, with a rich vocabulary and formal grammar.
This is probably how most of the world’s 140 or so major sign languages started life. The beauty of ABSL is that it is emerging right now, in front of linguists’ eyes. “We can literally see it unfold,” says Wendy Sandler at the University of Haifa, Israel, who launched the ABSL study.
ABSL has other features that make it especially appealing. Unlike other village signs studied so far, it apparently emerged uninfluenced by the other languages used in the village today – modern Arabic, the local Bedouin dialect, Hebrew and Israeli Sign Language. That makes it possibly the purest sign language ever recorded – a pristine expression of the human instinct to converse.
In addition, the deafness gene does not cause any physical or mental disabilities and deafness is not stigmatised in Al-Sayyid, so deaf people are fully integrated into society. Both deaf and hearing members of the community are fluent signers. During my visit, I spoke with a group of boys playing soccer on a dusty courtyard. The hearing kids immediately translated into ABSL so that all could participate in the conversation.
ABSL thus offers a unique opportunity to test a theory that has dominated linguistics since the 1950s. Put forth by Noam Chomsky, it claims that language is an innate and uniquely human trait, programmed into our genes. Children are born with a “language instinct” that compels them to effortlessly acquire whatever language (or languages) they are immersed in as toddlers.
Chomsky also proposed the idea of a “universal grammar” shared by all languages. He said that a Martian visitor to Earth would find that, apart from their mutually unintelligible vocabularies, “Earthlings speak a single language.” Thus began the search for deep structures common to human languages across cultures.
That is what makes village signs like ABSL so fascinating. If Chomsky is right, their spontaneous emergence and evolution ought to reveal the language instinct at work, as home signers invent a rudimentary language from scratch and their children and children’s children convert it into a full-blown language.
As predicted, ABSL started to evolve a grammar in its second generation of signers. In 2005 Sandler’s team that one of the most important organising principles of any language – the word order in a sentence – appeared to be settling on a rule called subject-object-verb (S-O-V; “I ball kick”).
That was a tantalising result. For one thing, Arabic and Hebrew use a different word order (S-V-O; “I kick ball”), bolstering the case for ABSL’s linguistic independence (though Israeli Sign Language uses S-O-V very occasionally, which muddies the water a bit). More importantly, S-O-V has an important place in universal grammar. The majority of the world’s spoken languages use that rule and Chomskyan theory sees it as being the purest expression of innate grammar.
But as the ABSL study has progressed, that early result has not played out as expected. Despite passing through four generations, ABSL’s grammar remains simple, inconsistent and, at best, a work in progress.
When he first began studying ABSL in 2000, Mark Aronoff at Stony Brook University in New York expected it to support Chomskyan theory. But after watching the language evolve unpredictably, with vocabulary developing quickly but grammar more slowly and inconsistently, Aronoff has changed his mind. He now thinks that although we do have an innate capacity for language, it is not uniquely human but rooted in deeper biological properties shared across species.
Another challenge to conventional wisdom is that despite its simple grammar, ABSL can still convey complex ideas. I witnessed villagers fluently describing their dreams and ambitions, gossiping about weddings or births and discussing topics such as national insurance plans and construction projects. How ABSL achieves this without complex grammar is largely a mystery.
Multiple signs
Another intriguing feature of ABSL is its sprawling vocabulary. As is often the case in emerging languages, signers invent new signs by combining existing ones. “Pray” and “house” combine to mean “mosque”; “cold” and “large rectangle” to mean “refrigerator”. But unexpectedly, these compounds do not appear to be converging onto agreed conventions. Even common nouns can have multiple signs, some used by just one household. For example, there are three different signs for “cat” – whiskers, footprints and the licking of paws.
This phenomenon alerted the researchers’ to a neglected factor in sign language development: social interaction. Urban deaf communities, which tend to be more segregated from hearing society, often encounter strangers and need to make themselves understood. The deaf people of Al-Sayyid, by contrast, all know one another, so are under less pressure to conventionalise.
All in all, research on ABSL is playing into an emerging consensus in linguistics – that Chomskyan theory is a busted flush.
That view is probably best expressed in an influential 2009 article “The myth of language universals”, by Nicholas Evans at the Australian National University and Stephen Levinson at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. In it they wrote: “The claims of Universal Grammar… are either empirically false, unfalsifiable, or misleading in that they refer to tendencies rather than strict universals. Structural differences [between languages] should instead be accepted for what they are, and integrated into a new approach to language and cognition that places diversity at centre stage.”
They argued that only once researchers accepted that diversity, not uniformity, is what makes language remarkable could they begin to truly understand how humans process language, and to what extent its emergence is influenced by a combination of biological and sociocultural forces ().
That is essentially what has happened with ABSL. When researchers stopped focusing on grammatical structures, they were able to see that while the urge to create the language does appear to be biological, it is also cultural and social, stemming from the villagers’ heritage, identity and social conditions.
But even as ABSL helps to undermine the dominant linguistic theory of the 20th century, it is itself being threatened by forces beyond its control.
Unsurprisingly given their fragile origins and small pool of speakers, village sign languages are at high risk of extinction – usually at the hands of an education system that teaches the official national sign language.
That is increasingly happening in Al-Sayyid. In 2004, the village was officially recognised by the Israeli government, granting it the right to municipal services. Children were bussed off to deaf schools in other towns where they were exposed to Israeli Sign Language, the country’s dominant sign language with an estimated 10,000 speakers. Then, in 2007, the village launched its own deaf education programme. Teachers were brought in from outside the village, and Israeli Sign Language was the language of instruction.
The effects were soon felt. Where the village once boasted a robust signing community, made up of both hearing and deaf people who learned ABSL early in life, today the hearing and deaf communities are becoming increasingly estranged.
Salah al-Sayyid, a principal at a local school and the son of one of the village’s first signers, says that the changes have driven a wedge between ABSL-signing parents and their children. Residents under 30, he says, have a greater command of Israeli Sign Language because of exposure in school and on television, and as their social networks expand beyond the village. This trend is expected to grow as more young people find work outside the village, and, with the help of apps like Skype, find it easier to socialise with deaf people from other parts of the country. Kawkeb, one of Salah’s own deaf daughters, married a Bedouin man from elsewhere and talks with him in Israeli Sign Language.
“As we lose ABSL we’re losing everything that comes with it,” he says. “The culture of our ancestors, their values of hospitality, their slow-paced life. We believe that this is the beginning of the end for the language.”
“If we lose our sign language, we’re losing everything that comes with it“
For now ABSL seems to be uninfluenced by Israeli Sign Language, but Sandler’s team expects it to undergo a creolisation process, in which the two merge into a hybrid language, or creole. In that case ABSL is likely to be the junior partner. Israeli Sign Language is perceived as the more prestigious and more practical of the two, and is likely to overwrite ABSL’s vocabulary and grammar.
That would not end linguists’ interest in ABSL. They would shift their attention to the creolisation process, another useful window on the emergence of structure in language. But the loss of this unique opportunity to study the birth of a language uninfluenced by others will nevertheless be keenly felt.
While there’s still time, researchers are scrambling to collect as much pristine ABSL as they can. In 2014, the team created a dictionary, including a comprehensive history of the language and its many surprising developments over four generations of users. Even once it disappears, the study will go on. The team has recorded enough video footage of the language to keep the busy for years.
It is, of course, difficult to decry social transformations that bring deaf children greater access to education and job prospects. And while some villagers are frustrated by the changes, others have praised the shift towards integration into Israeli society. Even those who regret the inevitable consignment of ABSL to the ranks of historical languages can see the positive side.
“Language is a tool for communication, so it needs to be constantly undergoing revival and renewal,” says Salah al-Sayyid, unsentimentally, as he sips coffee in his front yard. “Just as you may like to look at a picture of your grandfather’s car, you wouldn’t want to drive that car because it wouldn’t hold up to the standards of today. We can’t preserve everything.”
This article appeared in print under the headline “The birth and death of a language”
