Talking Hands
In a remote corner of Israel, a Bedouin community is the subject of Margalit Fox’s new book, Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals About the Mind (Simon & Schuster).
Fox, a linguist and New York Times journalist, was accompanied by four other linguists to investigate the peculiar story of a place where a relatively new sign language is spoken by deaf and hearing residents alike.
In Al-Sayyid, the number of deaf people is more than 40 times that of the general population — 150 out of 3,500 — and because of this prevalence, the community makes for an interesting study of both language and culture, especially due to the fact that so many hearing residents learn and speak the language of their deaf neighbors. Fox writes,
“It is quite unremarkable to be deaf here….In Al-Sayyid there is neither deaf culture nor deaf identity politics, because there is little hegemony of the hearing.”
After an anthropological ’study’ of the community, Fox gets into the beginnings of an ongoing study of the town’s sign language. She also gives us a brief history of Western sign languages, explaining why speakers of British Sign Language and American Sign Language can’t understand each other (ASL is based on French Sign Language.)
“If the linguists can isolate the formal elements that make Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language a language, they will have helped illuminate one of the most
