Indo-Pakistani Sign Language

Varieties

There are many varieties of sign language in the region, including many pockets of home sign and local sign languages, such as Ghandruk Sign Language, Jhankot Sign Language, and Jumla Sign Language in Nepal, and Alipur Sign Language in India, which appear to be language isolates. There are also various Sri Lankan sign languages which may not even be related to each other. However, the urban varieties of India, Pakistan, Nepal (Nepalese Sign Language), and Bangladesh are clearly related (although, for Nepalese Sign Language at least, it is not clear whether the relation is genetic, or perhaps rather one of borrowing compounded by extensive incorporation of a shared South Asian gestural base). There is disagreement whether these related varieties should be considered separate languages.

• Woodward (1992a) researched the vocabulary of the sign language varieties in Karachi (Sindh, Pakistan), Delhi (NCT, India), Bombay (Maharashtra, India), Bangalore (Karnataka, India) and Calcutta (West Bengal, India). He found cognacy rates of 62–71% between the Karachi vocabulary on the one hand and the four Indian vocabularies on the other, and concluded that 'sign language varieties in India and Pakistan are distinct but closely related language varieties belonging to the same language family'.
• Woodward (1993) expanded on his 1992 research by comparing the results from India and Pakistan with new data from Nepal, tentatively concluding that the sign language varieties of India, Pakistan, Nepal and probably also Bangladesh and Sri Lanka are so closely related that they may, in fact, constitute a single sign language.
• Ulrike Zeshan (2000), based on her own research in Karachi and New Delhi, concluding that their grammar was identical and there were only small differences in vocabulary, proposed that the Indian and Pakistani varieties constitute a single language, introduced the term 'Indo-Pakistani Sign Language' and emphatically rejected the notion of separate Indian and Pakistani sign languages.
• The ISO 639-3 standard categorises these varieties as three separate sign languages in India and Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Nepal. Ethnologue (2016), which follows the ISO standard, acknowledges the relatedness of these varieties as well as the controversy over whether they are one language or many. They identify the following variety within India: Bangalore-Chennai-Hyderabad Sign Language, Mumbai-Delhi Sign Language and Kolkata Sign Language.

• Johnson and Johnson (2016) found in a comparative study of signs used in Delhi, Kolkata, and Dhaka that the language used in Delhi was different enough from that of the cities in Bengal to impede mutual intelligibility. Enough similarities were observed between the signs used in Kolkata and Dhaka to demonstrate decisively that these cities use the same sign language variety.

While the sign system in IPSL appears to be largely indigenous, elements in IPSL are derived from British Sign Language. For example, most IPSL signers nowadays use fingerspelling based on British Sign Language fingerspelling, with only isolated groups using an indigenous Devanagari-based fingerspelling system (for example, Deaf students and graduates of the school for the deaf in Vadodara/Baroda, Gujarat). In addition, more recently contact with foreign Deaf has resulted in rather extensive borrowing from International Signs and (either directly or via International Signs) from American Sign Language. A small number of the Deaf in and around Bengaluru are often said to use American Sign Language (owing to a longstanding ASL deaf school there); however it is probably more correct to say that they use a lexicon based largely on ASL (or Signed English), while incorporating also a not inconsequential IPSL element. Furthermore, regardless of the individual signs used, the grammar used is clearly IPSL and not ASL.

The Delhi Association for the Deaf is reportedly working with Jawaharlal Nehru University to identify a standard sign language for India.

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. Symbolic hand gestures known as mudras have been employed in religious contexts in Hinduism, Buddhism and Zoroastrianism for many centuries, although Buddhism have often excluded deaf people from participation in a ritual or religious membership. In addition, classical Indian dance and theatre often employs stylised hand gestures with particular meanings.

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 intelligible signs.

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 village sign language had emerged and was used by both deaf and hearing members of the community. Ethnologist and political officer John Henry Hutton wrote:

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.

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 the Indian 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." Later in the 19th century, residential deaf schools 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, and schools in Madras and Calcutta which opened in the 1890s. Other residential schools soon followed, such as the "School for Deaf and Dumb Boys" at Mysore, founded in 1902, a school in Dehiwala in what is now Sri Lanka, founded in 1913, and "The Ida Rieu School for blind, deaf, dumb and other defective children", founded in 1923 in Karachi, in what is now Pakistan.

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 Dhaka, Barisal and Kolkata, 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." 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."

Grammar

Despite the common assumption that Indo-Pakistani Sign Language is the manual representation of spoken English or Hindi, it is in fact unrelated to either language and has its own grammar. Zeshan (2014) discusses three aspects of IPSL: its lexicon, syntax and spatial grammar. Some distinct features of IPSL that differ from other sign languages include:

• Number Signs: The numbers from zero to nine are formed in IPSL by holding up a hand with the appropriate handshape for each number. From one to five the corresponding number of extended fingers forms the numeral sign, whereas for zero and the numbers from six to nine special handshapes are used that derive from written numbers. Ten may either be expressed by two 5-hands or by '1+0'. (Zeshan, 2000)
• Family Relationship: The signs for family relationship are preceded by the sign for 'male/man' and 'female/woman'.

i)

man

sibling

brother

ii)

woman

sibling

sister

• Sign families: Several signs belong to same family if they share one or more parameters including handshapes, place of articulation and movement.
  • Pass and fail have the same handshape, but move in opposite directions.
  • Money, pay and rich have the same handshape, but different places of articulation and movement patterns.
  • Think, know and understand use the same place of articulation, viz, the head.
• The IPSL consists of various non-manual gestures including mouth pattern, mouth gesture, facial expression, body posture, head position and eye gaze (Zeshan, 2001)
• There is no temporal inflection in IPSL. The past, present and future is depicted by using signs for before, then, and after.
• Question words like what or where are placed at the end of a sentence.

i)

BANK

bank

WHERE

WH

Where is the bank?

ii)

SICK

sick

WHO

WH

Who is sick?

• The use of space is a crucial feature of IPSL.

Sentences are always predicate final, and all of the signs from the open lexical classes can function as predicates. Ellipsis is extensive, and one-word sentences are common. There is a strong preference for sentences with only one lexical argument. Constituent order does not play any role in the marking of grammatical relations. These are coded exclusively by spatial mechanisms (e.g., directional signs) or inferred from the context. Temporal expressions usually come first in the sentence, and if there is a functional particle, it always follows the predicate (e.g., YESTERDAY FATHER DIE COMPLETIVE – "(My) father died yesterday").

Popular culture

Indo-Pakistani 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
• Khamoshi: The Musical, a 1996 film about a deaf couple with a daughter who becomes a musician
• Black, a 2005 film about a blind and deaf girl based in part on the life of Helen Keller

Computational resources

There has been some significant amount of research on sign language recognition, but with much less focus for Indian sign language. Due to the political divide, Indian and Pakistani sign languages are generally perceived different, hence leading to fragmented research. There have been a few initiatives that gather open resources for Indian and Pakistani SLs.