Indian Sign Language

language
name=Indian Sign Language
states=India, Pakistan
region=Regional dialects
signers=Unknown
fam1=Related to Nepalese Sign Language and possibly other sign languages of the region
iso2=sgn
iso3=ins

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). [cite journal
author=Vasishta, M., J. C. Woodward, and K. L. Wilson
year=1978
title=Sign Language in India: Regional Variation within the Deaf Population
journal=Indian Journal of Applied Linguistics
volume=4
issue=2
pages=66–74] [Ethnologue gives the signing population in India as 2,680,000 in 2003.
cite book
author = Gordon, Raymond G., Jr. (ed.)
year = 2005
title = Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Fifteenth edition.
publisher = Dallas, Tex.: SIL International.
url = http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=ins] 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.cite book
author = Ulrike Zeshan
title = Sign Language of Indo-Pakistan: A description of a Signed Language
publisher = John Benjamins Publishing Co
location = Philadelphia, Amsterdam
year = 2000 ]

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.

tatus of sign language

Deaf schools in the region are overwhelmingly oralist in their approach. [cite book
author = Dilip Deshmukh
title = Sign Language and Bilingualism in Deaf Education,
location = Ichalkaranji,
year = 1996]

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. [cite journal
last= Woodward
first= J
author = Woodward, J
year = 1993
title = The relationship of sign language varieties in India, Pakistan and Nepal
journal= Sign Language Studies
issue= 78
pages= 15–22] 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. [cite web
url= http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=ins
title= Ethnologue entry on Indian Sign Language
accessdate=2007-05-05] 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. [cite web
author = Press Trust of India
title = Standard sign language for the deaf in India soon
url = http://www.deaftoday.com/v3/archives/2004/09/standard_sign_l.html
location = New Delhi,
publisher = Hindustan Times
date = 2004-09-16]

History

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. [cite web
url = http://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/bibweb/Miles/Miles.html
accessdate = 2007-05-06
date = 2001
author = M. Miles
title = Sign, Gesture & Deafness in South Asian & South-West Asian Histories: a bibliography with annotation and excerpts from India; also from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Burma / Myanmar, Iraq, Nepal, Pakistan, Persia / Iran, & Sri Lanka.] 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. [Scholar of Oriental studies H. W. Bailey identifies passages in the "Avesta" (Yast 5.93) and the Vinaya, e.g. "Excluded from the Buddhist Theravāda community (sangha-) were the andha-, mUga-, and badhira-, 'the blind, dumb, and deaf'." (Footnote: Pali Vinaya I, 91, 15)
cite journal
last=Bailey
first=H.W.
year=1961
title=Arya III
journal=Bull. School of Oriental & African Studies
issue=24
pages=470–483] In addition, classical Indian dance and theatre often employs stylised hand gestures with particular meanings. [cite book
author=Shukla, Hira Lal
year=1994
title=Semiotica Indica. Encyclopaedic dictionary of body-language in Indian art and culture. 2 vols
location=New Delhi
publisher=Aryan Books International]

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. [Vol. IV, Book LIII. cite book
author=Al-Marghinani
title=The Hedaya or Guide. A commentary on the Mussulman laws. 2nd edn. transl. Charles Hamilton, ed. Standish Grady
year=1870, reprint 1975, 4 vols in one
location=Lahore
Publisher=Premier Book]

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:

cquote|"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." [cite book
author=Hutton, John Henry
year=1921
title=The Angami Nagas, with some notes on neighbouring tribes
location=London
publisher=MacMillan
pages=291-292]

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." [Miles, M. 2001, extended and updated 2006-04. "Signs of Development in Deaf South & South-West Asia: histories, cultural identities, resistance to cultural imperialism". This is a further revised, extended and updated version of a chapter first published in: Alison Callaway (ed) Deafness and Development, University of Bristol, Centre for Deaf Studies, 2001. Internet publication URL: http://www.independentliving.org/docs7/miles200604.html] 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 Leo Meurin in the 1880s, [Hull, Ernest R. (1913) Bombay Mission-History with a special study of the Padroado Question. Volume II 1858-1890. Bombay: Examiner Press] and schools in Madras [Report on Public Instruction in the Madras Presidency for 1892-93. Madras, 1893. (Report by D. Duncan).] and Calcutta [Editorial (1895), "The deaf mutes in India". The Indian Magazine and Review, August 1895, pp. 436-38. (Quoting largely an article by Ernest J.D. Abraham, in The British Deaf-Mute, May 1895).] which opened in the 1890s. Other residential schools soon followed, such as the "School for Deaf and Dumb Boys" at Mysore, founded in 1902, [Iyer, A. Padmanabha (1938). "Modern Mysore, impression of a visitor". Trivandrum: Sridhara Printing House. pp 78-83] a school in Dehiwala in what is now Sri Lanka, founded in 1913, [Smith, M. Saumarez (1915) "C.E.Z.M.S. Work among the Deaf in India & Ceylon". London: Church of England Zenana Mission Society. p. 13] and "The Ida Rieu School for blind, deaf, dumb and other defective children", founded in 1923 in Karachi, in what is now Pakistan. [Report on Public Instruction in the Bombay Presidency for the Year 1923-24. Bombay: Central Govt Press. 1925. (Report by M. Hesketh). p. 91]

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." [Banerjee, H.C. (1928) The sign language of deaf-mutes. Indian Journal of Psychology 3: 69-87. (quote from p.70)] 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." [Swainson, Florence (1906). "Report of the Deaf and Dumb and Industrial School in connection with the Church of England Zenana Mission, Palamcottah, South India, for 1905". Palamcottah: Church Mission Press. p.9]

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:

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
* , a 1996 film about deaf and mute parents with a daughter who can hear
* Black, a 2005 film about a blind and deaf girl

References

Further reading

* Deshmukh, D (1997), "Sign Language and Bilingualism in Deaf Education". Ichalkaranj, India: Deaf Foundation.
* Sulman, Nasir & Zuberi, Sadaf (2002) "Pakistan Sign Language - A synopsis".

External links

* [http://www.geocities.com/mbs_indore/Pages/ Higher Secondary School & Multi Purpose Training Institute for Deaf] (Indore, Madhya Pradesh) — a residential school run by a deaf couple and using Indian Sign Language in the classroom.