New sign language is surprisingly sophisticated

[Harold F. Schiffman]

New Language Has Surprising Structure

By Robert Roy Britt

LiveScience Senior Writer posted: 31 January 2005 05:08 pm ET

A language in use for just 70 years has evolved quickly and with
unexpected structure, researchers said Monday. The Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign
Language (ABSL) is as an alternative language for a community of about
3,500 people, several of whose members are deaf.  It has been in use for
three generations, arising naturally with no outside influence. Other
relatively new languages are outgrowths of related tongues or are heavily
influenced by existing languages. So ABSL offered an unprecedented
opportunity to study the early development of language rules.

Scientists expected to find a rudimentary set of gestures for ABSL. "But I
was impressed immediately by how sophisticated the language was,"  said
Carol Padden, professor of communication at the University of California,
San Diego. "This is not an ad hoc, spur of the moment communication. It is
a complex language capable of relating information beyond the here and
now." The language has given scientists their first opportunity to witness
the laying of a grammatical foundation.

The research team was surprised to find ABSL sentence structure opposite
to other languages in the region. ABSL sentences follow this order:
subject-object-verb, as in "woman apple give." In other languages in the
area, as well as in English, the order is subject-verb-object. "The
grammatical structure of the Bedouin sign language shows no influence from
either the dialect of Arabic spoken by hearing members of the community or
the predominant sign language in the surrounding area, Israeli Sign
Language," Padden said. "Our findings support the idea that word order is
one of the first features of a language, and that it appears very early."
Bedouin's are nomadic tribes. But they do settle. Al-Sayyid is a village
of 3,500 Bedouins in Israel's Negev Desert. Two sons of the founder were
deaf. The trait surfaces whenever two carriers have a child, so the deaf
people -- numbering about 150 now -- are distributed throughout the
village.  "It is a language of the entire community, both hearing and
deaf," Padden said. "ABSL is transmitted within families across
generations, and children learn it without explicit instruction. It is the
best analogue we have for studying how any new language is born and
grows."

Initial results of the ongoing study will be published online this week by
the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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