Anthropology-Social SciencesWendy Sandler *, Irit Meir , Carol Padden , and Mark Aronoff
*Department of English Language and Literature and Departments of Hebrew Language and Communication Disorders and Language Sciences, University of Haifa, 31905 Haifa, Israel; Department of Communication, University of California at San Diego, CA 92093; and Department of Linguistics, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794. Edited by Jeremy A. Sabloff, University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Philadelphia, PA, and approved January 3, 2005 (received for review August 2, 2004)
*Department of English Language and Literature and Departments of Hebrew Language and Communication Disorders and Language Sciences, University of Haifa, 31905 Haifa, Israel; Department of Communication, University of California at San Diego, CA 92093; and Department of Linguistics, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794. Edited by Jeremy A. Sabloff, University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Philadelphia, PA, and approved January 3, 2005 (received for review August 2, 2004)
This report contains a linguistic description of a language created spontaneously without any apparent external influence in a stable existing community.
We describe the syntactic structure of Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language, a language that has arisen in the last 70 years in an isolated endogamous community with a high incidence of nonsyndromic, genetically recessive, profound prelingual neurosensory deafness.
In the space of one generation from its inception, systematic grammatical structure has emerged in the language. Going beyond a conventionalized list of words for actions, objects, people, characteristics, and so on, a systematic way of marking the grammatical relations among those elements has appeared in the form of highly regular word order.
These systematic structures cannot be attributed to influence from other languages, because the particular word orders that appear in Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language differ from those found both in the ambient spoken languages in the community and in the other sign language found predominantly in the surrounding area.
Therefore, the emerging grammatical structures should be regarded as an independent development within the language.
Author contributions: W.S., I.M., C.P., and M.A. designed research; W.S., I.M., C.P., and M.A. performed research; W.S., I.M., C.P., and M.A. contributed new reagents/analytic tools; I.M., C.P., W.S., and M.A. analyzed data; and M.A., C.P., W.S., and I.M. wrote the paper.
Freely available online through the PNAS open access option.
www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.0405448102
Copyright © 2005 by the National Academy of Sciences
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