In 2004, the Al-Sayyid community numbered around 3,000, most of whom trace their ancestry to the time the village was founded, in the mid-19th century, 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 due to the tribe's rejection by its neighbours for being "foreign fellahin". The gene became homozygous in several members of the family. ABSL was first studied in the late 1990s by anthropologist Shifra Kisch and 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 in near-isolation, is of particular interest to linguists for the insights it provides into the birth of human language.
Linguistics
Scholars study ABSL because since deaf people in Al-Sayyid cannot hear Arabic or Hebrew and they have not been exposed to any other sign languages, ABSL is a brand new language, uninfluenced by any other. ABSL is in its early stages, so researchers are observing the language as it develops. ABSL shows a preference for subject–object–verbword order, in marked contrast to the dialect of Arabic spoken by hearing members of the community, as well as Hebrew, classical Arabic, 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. These authors 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. Researchers have detected examples of abstraction in the language, a sure sign of grammatical development. For example, the sign for "man" is formed by the curling of the finger in the shape of a mustache, although Bedouin men no longer wear mustaches. However, the language does not currently contain "agreeing" verbs, as most known sign languages do, which may indicate that the language has more grammatical development in store. Additionally, as of 2011, there was no distinction into a phonological structure. The community was isolated not by geography but by social stigma, on several levels. Contact with the outside world is growing, as students are exposed to Israeli Sign Language and Jordanian Sign Language in schools, and community members are marrying outside the community.
