Talk in the intimate relationship his and hers

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PART III

Linguistic Anthropology

Language, whether spoken, written, or non-verbal, allows anthropologists to connect and better understand the human condition across time, space, and cul-

tures. Early in the history of American Anthropology, anthropologists like John

Wesley Powell and Franz Boas embraced linguistics as a critical subfi eld of the

discipline. Powell collected and compared vocabularies from American Indian

languages as part of an effort to racially classify North American Indian Nations.

Because Boas did not believe that culture and language were biologically deter-

mined, he disagreed with Powell’s approach. Instead, Boas trained his students

to use linguistic anthropology to facilitate fi eldwork; in his view, language was a

window into culture. Regardless of their contrasting theoretical positions regard-

ing the nature of language, Powell and Boas considered linguistics a critical com-

ponent of anthropology. European anthropologists like Bronislaw Malinowski

and E. E. Evans-Pritchard also valued language research as a component of cul-

tural anthropology, but only in the U.S. academy did anthropologists incorpo-

rate linguistics as an actual subfi eld of anthropology.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, the transformation of Anthropology

from an armchair pastime to a scientifi c, academic discipline coincided with the

rapid extinction of cultural traditions and languages. When undocumented or

poorly documented languages go extinct, humanity loses the specialized knowl-

edge, histories, and worldviews embedded in these languages. In order to pre-

serve and document “disappearing” cultures, early linguistic anthropologists

focused primarily on documenting the vocabularies and grammars of endangered

cultural traditions. Nevertheless, of an estimated 7,000 languages spoken in the

world today, linguists predict that approximately half of these languages will

become extinct in the twenty-fi rst century. Contemporary anthropologists con-

tinue to document endangered languages, but the fi eld of linguistic anthropology

has grown considerably as researchers have developed new approaches to study

language scientifi cally to explore what it means to be human.

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Today, linguistic anthropologists typically divide their subfi eld into three specializations: Historical Linguistics, Descriptive Linguistics, and Sociocultural Linguistics. Historical linguistics includes research on extinct languages as well as the evolution and migration of languages. In Selection 23, Bhattacharjee explains how computer modeling helps linguists see the infl uence of children and migration on the evolu- tion of language throughout the history of human- kind. Because language is not confi ned to speech and the written word, descriptive linguistics also studies the development of specialized sign languages to learn about the evolution of language (Selection 25).

Linguistic anthropologists who specialize in descriptive linguistics specialize in unraveling a lan- guage. Many anthropologists study descriptive lin- guistics so they can quickly learn an unwritten or lesser-known language in the fi eld. Descriptive lin- guistics researchers study words (morphology), sen- tences (syntax), and meaning (semantics), as well as the physical qualities (phonetics) and structure (pho- nology) of speech. Sociocultural linguists, on the other

hand, examine the relationship between language and sociocultural systems. For example, a focus on speech behavior and miscommunication between males and females (Selection 28), can tell an anthropological fi eld- worker a great deal about a society in which he or she studies and their cultural values.

In sum, linguistic anthropology is a multi- disciplinary and scientifi c study of human language. Linguists apply their skills as teachers and research- ers in universities, but you will also fi nd them working in government agencies, professional consulting fi rms, the corporate setting, and more recently in the high- tech sector (to design and improve Internet search engines, speech recognition, computer language mod- eling, the development of artifi cial intelligence, and computer mediated communication). Ultimately, the linguistic anthropologist uses her or his unique meth- odological toolkit to do what cultural anthropologists, biological anthropologists, and archaeologists do; they develop and test hypotheses to examine the complex diversity and universals of the human experience across time and space.

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New Technology is one of the many ways new words enter our daily vocabulary. Before 2001 the terms “iPod” and “podcast” did not exist, but now these are ubiquitous words used every day on college campuses throughout the United States. New words like “pod- cast” and “email” may seem like benign additions to our language, but not everyone is ambivalent to this technology-inspired linguistic evolution.

In 2008, for example, linguists from the Ministry of Culture in France banned the word “podcast” along with over 500 other words like “wi-fi ” and “super- model.” Because these non-French words have crept into daily French vocabularies, the Ministry of Culture seeks to prevent these linguistic intrusions by offer- ing alternative terms such as “courriel” instead of “email.” Linguistic nationalism and transformation is not unique to France; it was not long ago that the U.S. Congress legislated that french fries in the Capitol Hill cafeteria would be called “freedom fries.”

Languages evolve to fi t the needs and lives of the people who use them. In this selection, Bhattacharjee explains how computer modeling helps linguists see

If a modern-day priest were to chance upon an elev- enth century manuscript of The Lord’s Prayer in English, he would need the Lord’s help to decipher its mean- ing. Much of the text would be gobbledygook to him, apart from a few words that might have a recognizable ring, such as heofonum (heavens) and yfele (evil). And even after a word-for-word translation, the priest would be left with the puzzling grammatical structure of sen- tences like “Our daily bread give us today.”

Although researchers generally think of languages as having evolved slowly over many millennia, language change occurring over time spans of a few centuries

the infl uence of children and migration on linguistic transformation throughout the history of humankind.

As you read this selection, ask yourself the following questions:

■ Why do anthropologists study the evolution of words and grammar?

■ Why do languages change, and why do linguists view language change as a paradox?

■ What role do children play in linguistic evolution?

■ How do non-native speakers transform a language?

■ How does population growth impact the evolution of a language?

The following terms discussed in this selection are included in the Glossary at the back of the book:

creole sociolinguistics computational linguistics verb-second structure

has confounded scholars since medieval times. After trying to read a 600-year-old document, the fi rst known printer of English works, William Caxton, lamented in 1490, “And certainly it was written in such a way that it was more like German than English. I could not recover it or make it understandable” (translated from Old English).

The comparative analysis of such texts is the closest that researchers can get to tracing the evolutionary path of a language. By studying the evolution of words and grammar over the past 1200 years of recorded history, linguists hope to understand the general principles underlying the development of languages. “Since we can assume that language and language change have operated in the same way for the past 50,000 years, modern language change can offer insights into earlier changes that led to the diversifi cation of languages,”

23 From Heofonum to Heavens

Yudhijit Bhattacharjee

Bhattacharjee, Yudhijit. “From Heofonum to Heavens.” Science 303, no. 5662 (27 Feb. 2004):1326–1328. Reprinted with permission from AAAS.

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160 LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGY

because the Scandinavians had diffi culties keeping track of all the verb forms—and settled on a simplifi ed system closer to what we use today.

In the absence of invasions and other external infl uences, languages can remain stable for long peri- ods. Japanese and Icelandic, for instance, have hardly changed since 800 c.e. But researchers point out that isolation does not guarantee the status quo; grammati- cal shifts can also be triggered by internal forces such as minor changes in the way a language is spoken.

French is a case in point. In the sixteenth century, the language changed from a system in which the verb always had to be in second place (known as a verb-second structure) to one in which the verb (V) could be in any position as long as it came after the subject (S) and before the object (O); Modern French and Modern English both have this SVO structure. For example, “Lors oirent ils venir un escoiz de tonnere” (Then heard they come a clap of thunder) became “Lors ils oirent venir un escoiz de tonnere” (Then they heard come a clap of thunder). Roberts, who documented the transition by comparing a representative text from each century between the thirteenth and the seven- teenth, believes that the change arose because speakers of Middle French reduced the emphasis on sub- ject pronouns—“they” in this example—to the point where children learning the language barely heard the pronouns. Roberts inferred this decline in phonetic stress from usage changes in the written language. For example, subject pronouns were earlier used with modifi ers, such as “I only,” but later they did not carry such modifi ers. The result of this reduced emphasis, says Roberts, “was that for sentences beginning with a subject pronoun, the verb sounded like the fi rst word of the sentence to the listener.” That ambiguity dealt a fatal blow to the verb-second rule, paving the way for the emergence of an SVO grammar.

JOHN THE BOOK BUYS

But a new grammatical feature cannot emerge over- night. For a variant such as an innovative construction by a single speaker or a novel form of syntax produced by a new adult learner to become part of the language, it must get picked up by other speakers and be trans- mitted to the next generation. Historical texts show that it can take centuries for a change to sweep through the entire community.

David Lightfoot, a linguist at Georgetown Univer- sity in Washington, D.C., says the key to understand- ing large-scale linguistic transformation lies in the link between the diffusion of novel forms through one gen- eration and large grammatical shifts occurring across generations—changes he calls “catastrophic.” And this

says Anthony Kroch, a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Since the mid-nineteenth century, that hope has driven scholars to document a variety of gram- matical, morphological, and phonological changes in French, English, and other languages. In the past three decades, more and more theoretical and historical lin- guists have turned their attention to analyzing these changes, and sociolinguists have explored the social and historical forces at work. Now researchers in the growing fi eld of computational linguistics are using computer models of speech communities to explore how such changes spread through a population and how language changes emerge in multilingual popu- lations.

The simulations are infusing precision into the study of a phenomenon once thought to be the exclu- sive domain of humanistic inquiry. “Computational modeling of language change is in its infancy, but it is already helping us to reason more clearly about the factors underlying the process,” says Ian Roberts, a lin- guist at the University of Cambridge, U.K.

VOICE OF THE VIKINGS

Linguists view language change as something of a par- adox. Because children learn the language of their par- ents faithfully enough to be able to communicate with them, there seems no reason for language to change at all. But historical texts show that change is com- mon, although the trajectory and rate of change may be unique for any given language. In the tenth century, to consider a classic example, English had an object- verb grammar like that used today in Modern German, requiring sentence constructions such as “Hans must the horse tame.” By 1400 c.e., the English were using the familiar verb-object grammar of “Hans must tame the horse.” French underwent a similar change before the sixteenth century, whereas German retained its basic grammar.

To fi nd out why such changes happen, research- ers explore the historical circumstances surrounding them. In the past few years, based on a comparative analysis of religious texts from northern and southern England, Kroch and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania have suggested that northern English was transformed during the eleventh and twelveth century as Viking conquerors married native Anglo- Saxon women, who spoke Old English. The resulting bilingual households became crucibles for linguistic change. For example, whereas Old English had distinct verb endings to mark differences in person, number, and tense, the speakers of what is now called Early Middle English began using simpler verbs—perhaps

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FROM HEOFONUM TO HEAVENS 161

link, according to him and many others, is language acquisition. Children may simply carry forward a vari- ant that arose in the preceding generation. But more signifi cantly, says Lightfoot, children may themselves serve as agents of change “by reinterpreting a gram- matical rule because of exposure to a variant during their learning experience.” As adults, they may end up using a somewhat different grammatical system from that of their parents. Repeated over generations, this can lead to a dramatic makeover in the language.

Computational linguists such as Partha Niyogi of the University of Chicago have built computer models to understand the dynamics of such evolution. Their goal is to map out the relationship between learning by the individual and language change in the popula- tion, which Niyogi calls the “main plot in the story of language change.”

In one of the fi rst attempts to unravel that plot’s outline, Niyogi and Robert Berwick, a computer scien- tist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, came up with a class of models simulating the transmis- sion of language across generations. They started out by considering a virtual population with two types of adult speakers. The fi rst type uses one set of grammati- cal rules—say, one that, like English, mandates a verb- object order for all constructions, generating sentences such as “John buys the book,” and “I know that John buys the book.” The rest of the speakers use a differ- ent grammar, for example one similar to German, in which the fi rst verb goes in the second position but the second verb goes after the object. The speakers of the second grammar produce some sentences exactly like speakers of the fi rst—“John buys the book”—but they also produce other kinds of sentences such as “I know that John the book buys.” The researchers spelled out a learning algorithm for children in this population, providing each learner with logical steps for acquir- ing grammatical rules from linguistic encounters with adults.

Following the linguistic behavior of this virtual community over generations led Niyogi and Berwick to a startling conclusion. They found that contrary to expectation, the population does not inevitably con- verge on the grammar spoken by the majority, nor on the simpler of the two grammars. Instead, the winning grammar is the one with fewer grammatically ambig- uous sentences like “John buys the book,” which, although simple, might be analyzed as belonging to either grammatical type. In other words, if minority speakers consistently produce a smaller proportion of grammatically ambiguous sentences as compared to the majority, the population will over time shift com- pletely to the minority grammar.

Niyogi, who fi rst presented the work at the Inter- national Conference on the Evolution of Language

at Harvard in April 2002 and has published it in his book, says the fi nding makes it possible to imagine how a grammatical variant spoken by a handful of individuals might replace an entrenched grammar. It’s conceivable for the variant to pose no threat to the established grammar for many generations, he says, until the proportion of grammatically ambiguous sentences produced by speakers of the variant drops below the corresponding proportion for the dominant grammar. “For instance, sociocultural factors might change the content of conversations among minority, English-type speakers in a way that they stop using single-clause sentences like ‘John buys the book,’ “ says Niyogi. That would make their speech more complex—but less grammatically ambiguous. Then learners would hear a higher proportion of the multi- ple-clause, uniquely English constructions in English speech than they would hear uniquely German con- structions in German speech. This would make them more likely to infer the English grammatical system from what they heard, even though their overall expo- sure to German and even uniquely German construc- tions would be greater. Suddenly, the mainstream German grammar would become unstable and the English grammar would begin to take over.

“That a little good info should be able to trump a lot of bad [ambiguous] info makes sense,” says Norbert Hornstein, a linguist at the University of Maryland, College Park, who sees the mechanism of change sug- gested by Niyogi as “a good fi t with our understand- ing of language acquisition.” He says it provides a possible explanation for how small local changes—for instance, a simplifi cation of the verb system by mixed households in thirteenth century northern England— may have spread through the entire population. Con- fi rming this account of change would require testing computational models with real-world data such as the proportion of specifi c syntactical forms in histori- cal texts, assuming written language to be a faithful impression of speech. Niyogi admits that the task could take years.

In a broader sense, however, researchers have already validated the computational approach by matching the outlines of models to real-world situa- tions. For example, University of Cambridge linguist Ted Briscoe modeled the birth of a creole, a linguistic patois that arises from prolonged contact between two or more groups. He specifi cally considered Hawai- ian English, which developed between 1860 and 1930 through contact between Europeans, native Hawai- ians, and laborers shipped in from China, Portugal, and other countries. Briscoe’s simulation started out with a small but diverse group of speakers and fac- tored in the periodic infl ux of adult immigrants. He found that a population with the right mix of children

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and new adult learners converged on an SVO gram- mar after two generations. That matches empirical studies showing that many features of Hawaiian Cre- ole, including an SVO word order, did not stabilize until the second generation of learners.

Salikoko Mufwene, a sociolinguist at the University of Chicago, says that a detailed picture of mechanisms of language change could emerge if computational researchers succeed in modeling very specifi c contexts. For instance, he says, modeling spoken exchanges on a homestead of eight Europeans and two African slaves could help illuminate the linguistic evolution of the larger community. “The two Africans in this example are likely to be so well immersed that after a few months they would be speaking a second language variety of the European language. Say one of the Africans is a woman and bears a child with one of the white colo- nists. The child is likely to speak like the father because the father’s language happens to be dominant at the homestead. Growing up, this child will serve as a model for children of new slaves,” explains Mufwene. “Non- native speakers will exert only a marginal infl uence

on the emergent language of the community,” in this case the native European variety.

But if the population increases signifi cantly through a large infl ux of new slaves, he says, the dynamics of interaction change, and more adult nonnative speakers of the European language serve as models. Children now have a greater likelihood of acquiring some of the features spoken by adult nonnatives and transmitting them to future learners; over time, a new variety of the European language will emerge.

Detailed modeling along these lines, Mufwene says, could unveil the signifi cance of factors that researchers may have missed, such as the pattern of population growth and the pace of demographic shifts. “Even with- out real-world number crunching,” he says, “the exer- cise would suggest what questions we should be asking and what kinds of evidence we should be looking for.”

REFERENCES

Niyogi, P. 2006. The Computational Nature of Language Learn- ing and Evolution. MIT Press.

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Sign language, like any language, differs from place to place. In 1924 when athletes from Belgium, Czecho- slovakia, France, Great Britain, Holland, and Poland gathered at the fi rst World Games for the Deaf, they had to develop a new language to communicate with each other. Their impromptu system of hand signs became the foundation of a global sign language called International Sign.

Despite the existence of International Sign, deaf people and others throughout the world have devel- oped unique sign languages to fi t the uniqueness of their lived experiences. In recent years, for example, deaf and non-deaf poets have adapted sign languages to share their worldviews in ways that words and speech alone cannot. Pioneering sign language poets like Clayton Valli have helped the hearing world understand that signing, like speech, has rhymes, rhythm, and meter.

Humans communicate to connect and understand each other. This desire to connect is no different in the deaf community, even in remote locations where deaf people may not have opportunities to learn established sign languages. This selection describes the evolution of Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language, a language created in a remote Israeli village where an inherited form of deafness has created an incidence of deafness approximately forty times that of the general

population. Linguistic anthropologists “discovered” this island of the deaf in the late 1990s and have collab- orated with the local population to learn more about the evolution of language.

As you read this selection, ask yourself the following questions:

■ In what ways is Al-Sayyid an “island of the deaf?” ■ What is the difference between fi rst and second

generation users of Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language?

■ How do Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language, American Sign Language, and British Sign Language differ?

■ In what ways is Al-Sayyid an “island of the deaf?”

■ How does Bedouin Sign Language grammar differ from the verb-second grammar discussed in Bhattarcharjee’s chapter “From Heofonum to Heavens?”

The following terms discussed in this selection are included in the Glossary at the back of the book:

Babel homesigns Bedouin language instinct

25 Village of the Deaf

In a Bedouin Town, a Language Is Born

Margalit Fox

On this summer evening, the house is alive with people. In the main room, the owner of the house, a stocky man in a plaid shirt, has set a long plastic ban- quet table on the earthen fl oor, with a dozen plastic patio chairs around it. Children materialize with plat- ters of nuts, sunfl ower seeds, and miniature fruit. At

the head of the table, the owner is joined by a group of men in their thirties and forties. Down one side of the table is a row of boys, from toddlers to teenagers. At the foot of the table sits a knot of six visitors: four linguistics scholars, a video camera operator, and me.

The man and his family are Bedouins, and the house is at the edge of their village, Al-Sayyid. Though they live in the desert, the Bedouins of Al-Sayyid are not nomads. Their people have inhabited this vil- lage, tucked into an obscure corner of what is now Israel, miles from the nearest town, for nearly 200 years. They are rooted, even middle class. Men and boys are

Fox, Margalit. “Village of the Deaf: In a Bedouin Town, a Language Is Born.” Discover Magazine (July 2007):66–69 from Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals About the Mind by Fox. (Simon & Schuster, 2007). Reprinted with permission of the author.

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174 LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGY

bareheaded and dressed in Western clothing, mostly T-shirts and jeans. They own automobiles, computers, and VCRs. But there is something even more remark- able about the Al-Sayyid Bedouins—an unusual lan- guage, never documented until now.

The house is a Babel tonight. Around the table, six languages are fl owing. There are snatches of English, mostly for my benefi t. There is Hebrew: two of the lin- guists are from an Israeli university, and many men in Al-Sayyid speak Hebrew as well. There is a great deal of Arabic, the language of the home for Bedou- ins throughout the Middle East. But in the illuminated room, it is the other languages that catch the eye. They are signed languages, the languages of the deaf. As night engulfs the desert and the cameraman’s lights throw up huge, signing shadows, it looks as though language itself has become animate, as conversations play out in silhouette on the whitewashed walls.

There are three signed languages going. There is American Sign Language, used by one of the visitors, a deaf linguist from California. There is Israeli Sign Lan- guage (ISL), the language of the deaf in that country, whose structure the two Israeli scholars have devoted years to analyzing. And there is a third language, the one the linguists have journeyed here to see: Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL), which is spoken in this village and nowhere else in the world.

In Al-Sayyid, the four linguists have encoun- tered a veritable island of the deaf. In this isolated traditional community, where marriage to outsiders is rare, a form of inherited deafness has been passed down from one generation to the next for the last 70 years. Of the 3,500 residents of the village today, nearly 150 are deaf, an incidence forty times that of the general population. As a result, an indigenous signed language has sprung up, evolving among the deaf vil- lagers as a means of communication. But what is so striking about the sign language of Al-Sayyid is that many hearing villagers can also speak it. It permeates every aspect of community life, used between parents and children, husbands and wives, from sibling to sib- ling and neighbor to neighbor.

The team plans to observe the language, to record it, and to produce an illustrated dictionary, the fi rst- ever documentary record of the villagers’ signed com- munication system. But the linguists are after something even larger. Because Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Lan- guage has arisen entirely on its own, it offers a liv- ing demonstration of the “language instinct,” man’s inborn capacity to create language from thin air. If the linguists can decode this language—if they can isolate the formal elements that make Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language a language—they will be in possession of compelling new evidence in the search for the ingre- dients essential to all language. And in so doing, they

will have helped illuminate one of the most fundamen- tal aspects of what it means to be human.

When Wendy Sandler, a linguist at the University of Haifa, fi rst heard about Al-Sayyid in the late 1990s, she knew at once that she had to investigate. Over the next few years, she and Irit Meir, a colleague at Haifa, made cautious forays into Al-Sayyid, setting in motion the diplomacy that is a critical part of linguistic fi eld- work: explaining their intentions, hosting a day of activities at the village school, over time earning the trust of a number of the villagers.

Their work has a sense of urgency. Although the sign language of Al-Sayyid arose in a linguistic vacuum, the social realities of modern life, even in a remote desert community, make it impossible for it to remain that way. Over the years, many of Al-Sayyid’s deaf children have been bused to special classes for the deaf in nearby towns, where they are taught all day in spoken language—Hebrew or Arabic—accompanied by signs from Israeli Sign Language, a language utterly different from their own. In just one generation, when the older Bedouin signers die, the unique signed lan- guage of the village, at least in its present form, may be signifi cantly altered.

Omar, the owner of the home in which we gathered for the fi rst recording session, greeted us in Hebrew. Although he is hearing, Omar has deaf siblings and knows the village sign language. Carol Padden, a lin- guist from the University of California, San Diego, who is deaf, starts to sign to him, using gestures inter- national enough that they can be readily understood. Omar replies expansively in Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign: the seeds of a simple contact pidgin have been sown. When signers of different languages come together, communication is achieved partly through the use of the most transparent gestures possible, partly through a shared understanding of the particular devices that signed languages use to convey meaning. (Just such a contact language, called International Sign Pidgin, has developed over the years at places like sign-linguistics meetings, where deaf people from many countries converge.)

The sign language of a particular country is rarely contingent on the spoken language that surrounds it. American and British Sign Languages are mutually unintelligible. A deaf American will have an easier time understanding a deaf Frenchman: ASL is histori- cally descended from French Sign Language. Even the manual alphabet used by deaf signers can differ from one country to another. The letters of the American manual alphabet are signed using one hand; those of the British manual alphabet are made with two hands.

In her lab’s mission statement, Wendy sums up how studying sign languages can illuminate how the

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mind works: “It usually comes as a surprise to the layman to learn that nobody sat down and invented the sign languages of the deaf. These languages arise spontaneously, wherever deaf people have an oppor- tunity to congregate. That shows that they are the natural product of the human brain, just like spoken languages. But because these languages exist in a dif- ferent physical modality, researchers believe that they offer a unique window into the kind of mental system that all human language belongs to.”

Linguists have long believed that the ideal lan- guage to analyze would be one in its infancy. They even dream of the following experiment: simply grab a couple of babies, lock them in a room for a few years and record the utterances they produce. The scenario came to be known as the Forbidden Experiment.

It’s been tried. The historian Herodotus, writing in the fi fth century b.c., told of the Egyptian pharaoh Psammetichus, who, in an attempt to discover what the oldest civilization was, took two infants from their mothers and dispatched them to an isolated hut under the care of a mute shepherd. Eventually, one of the babies uttered the word bekos, which turned out to be the Phrygian word for “bread,” bringing the experi- ment to a happy conclusion.

But near the end of the twentieth century, linguists began to realize that their sought-after virgin language existed in the sign language of the deaf. Signed lan- guages spring from the same mental machinery that spoken languages do, but they are linguistic saplings.

The conditions that create an Al-Sayyid—a place where hundreds of people are habitual signers—are extremely particular. First, you need a gene for a form of inherited deafness. Second, you need huge families to pass the gene along, yielding an unusually large deaf population in a short span of time. Of Al-Sayyid’s 3,500 residents, about one in 25 is deaf—4 percent of the population. For deafness, a rate of 4 percent is a staggering fi gure: in the United States, the incidence of deafness in the general population is about one in 1,000. The presence of so many deaf signers in their midst also encourages widespread signing among the hearing. This helps keep the indigenous signed lan- guage alive for the village as a whole.

Wendy and her colleagues aren’t claiming that Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL) mirrors the evolutionary development of language in Homo sapiens. Rather, as Wendy explained, “we’re able to see, given the fully developed human brain, what happens when it has to make a language out of nothing.”

The first deaf children were born in Al-Sayyid 70 years ago, about ten of them in a single generation. By the time of our visit, only one member of the fi rst deaf generation was still alive, an elderly woman too infi rm to be interviewed. Today, the 150 or so deaf

people of Al-Sayyid include the second generation, men and women in their thirties and forties; and the third generation, their children.

When they were small, the fi rst-generation signers had developed systems of gestures, called homesigns, to communicate with their families. With so many homesigners in close proximity, a functional pidgin could develop quickly. And in just one generation, the children of these signers, like children of pidgin speak- ers everywhere, took their parents’ signed pidgin and gave it grammar, spontaneously transforming it into the signed language of Al-Sayyid.

Over time, the language developed complex- ity. “People can talk about things that are not in the here-and-now,” says Wendy. “They can talk about the traditional folklore of the tribe and say, ‘People used to do it this way and now they don’t,’ They’re able to transmit a lot of information—and things that are quite abstract.” For example, “A signer told us about the traditional method of making babies immune to scorpion bites. It takes a high degree of sophistication about their culture, and it also takes a high degree of abstraction to be able to convey it.”