Village of the Deaf

In a Bedouin town in the middle of Israel, all is as it seems. It is a peaceful town with children running along, people going along their business, toddlers and teenagers alike walking among the houses. What is unusual about the village is that up until now, it has been majorly isolated from the outside world. Not only that, but in Al-Sayyid, a form of inherited deafness has been passed down from one generation to the next for the last 70 years. Out of the 3,500 residents of the town, 150 are deaf, a statistic that is forty times that of normal level. Because of this, a new sign language that has never been documented before has sprung up among the village, which has evolved through the years to be one of the most unique sign languages practiced among the deaf villagers. Even though the sign language was created by the deaf to communicate, it has spread among the village, so that the people that have the ability to hear can also speak it. It pervades their community life, permeating every aspect of it.

Even though the village is mostly isolated from the modern world, the social realities of modern life are becoming an increasingly influential element among the village. People fear that the unique sign language of the village will eventually be lost as more modern sign languages and ways of communication come into play.

For now, it is amazing how sign languages can illuminate how the mind works. Sign languages and other forms of communication arise wherever the deaf congregate. Like spoken languages, these languages exist in a different physical form. From this, people are able to draw the conclusion that there is a unique system that all human language comes from.

Interestingly, people have attempted to find out this "universal language." Linguists have stood by their unwavering belief that this "universal language" would most likely be spoken during infancy. From this, the Forbidden Experiment was created, where details of the experiment included grabbing a couple of babies and locking them in a room for a few words, all the while recording what they uttered. This was only put into action once during the fifth century BC where the Egyptian pharaoh Psammetichus wanted to find out what the oldest civilization was. So two infants were snatched from their mothers and put in an isolated hut where a mute shepherd took care of them. After a short while, one of the babies uttered the word bekos, which is the Phrygian word for "bread." Fortunately, the experiment ended with a happy conclusion.

Hundreds of years later, linguists began to realize that this "universal language" did not lie in infants, but rather through the sign language of the deaf. Signed languages are essentially the same thing as spoken languages, just communication existing in a different form.

Al-Sayyid is a particular place, because the conditions found there are rarely found anywhere else in the world. The first condition is that an inherited gene of deafness is found to be running in family blood lines. Secondly, a huge family is needed to pass down the trait to create such a huge population of deaf signers. The statistical comparison between Al-Sayyid and the United States is significantly different as in the village, one in 25 is deaf while in the United States, it is one in 1,000 people. With 4 percent of the population in the village deaf signers, the people that have the ability to hear also frequently use the language, which as a whole keeps the indigenous signed language alive in the community. With this in mind, we're able to see what happens with and within the fully developed human mind when it has to make a language out of nothing.