Turkish Sign Language
Turkish Sign Language (Turkish: Türk İşaret Dili, TİD) is the language used by the deaf community in Turkey. As with other sign languages, TİD has a unique grammar that is different from the oral languages used in the region.
Turkish Sign Language | |
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Türk İşaret Dili | |
Native to | Turkey, Northern Cyprus |
Early form | Possibly from Ottoman Sign Language
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Language codes | |
ISO 639-3 | tsm |
Glottolog | turk1288 |
TİD uses a two-handed manual alphabet which is very different from the two-handed alphabets used in the BANZSL sign languages.
Grammar
There is little published information on Turkish Sign Language. Turkish Sign Language exhibits an subject-object-verb order (SOV). There is a rich set of modal verbs which appear in a clause-final position.[1]
Signing communities
According to the Turkish Statistical Institute, there are a total of 89,000 persons (54,000 male, 35,000 female) with hearing impairment and 55,000 persons (35,000 male, 21,000 female) with speaking disability living in Turkey, based on 2000 census data.[2]
History
TİD is dissimilar from European sign languages. There was a court sign language of the Ottoman Empire, which reached its height in the 16th century and 17th centuries and lasted at least until the early 20th.[3] However, there is no record of the signs themselves and no evidence the language was ancestral to modern Turkish Sign Language.[4]
Deaf schools were established in 1902, and until 1953 used TİD alongside the Turkish spoken and written language in education.[5] Since 1953 Turkey has adopted an oralist approach to deaf education.
See also
References
- Serpil Karabüklü, Fabian Bross, Ronnie B. Wilbur & Daniel Hole: Modal signs and scope relations in TİD. FEAST, 2, 82-92. DOI: 10.31009/FEAST.i2.07
- Türkiye İstatistik Kurumu, Nüfus, Konut ve Demografi Verileri 2000
- Miles, M. (2000). Signing in the Seraglio: Mutes, dwarfs and gestures at the Ottoman Court 1500-1700, Disability & Society, Vol. 15, No. 1, 115-134
- Turkish Sign Language (TİD) General Info Archived 2012-04-15 at the Wayback Machine, Dr. Aslı Özyürek, Koç University website, accessed 2011-10-06
- Deringil, S. (2002). İktidarın Sembolleri ve İdeoloji: II. Abdülhamid Dönemi (1876–1909), YKY, İstanbul, 249.
External links
- Turkish Sign Language (Turkish and English) Website including dictionary and general information, by the Turkish Academy of Sciences and Koç University
- Turkish National Deaf Federation homepage (Turkish and English).