Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL) (Arabic: لغة الإشارة لعشيرة السيد) is a village sign language used by about 150 deaf and many hearing members of the al-Sayyid Bedouin tribe in the Negev desert of southern Israel.
In 2004, the Al-Sayyid community numbered around 3,000, most of whom trace their ancestry to the time the village was founded, in the mid-19th century, by a local woman and an Egyptian man.
Two of this founding couple's five sons carried a gene for nonsyndromic, genetically recessive, profound pre-lingual neurosensory deafness.
The descendants of the founding couple often married their cousins owing to the tribe's rejection by its neighbours for being "foreign fellahin".
[2] Few syntactic markers such as complementizers, signs to signal conditionals or structures to mark questions have been found.
These functions are instead expressed through the use of prosodic cues to designate when a clause starts or ends or in order to link them together.
This can be seen in the absence of duality of patterning, which means signs in ABSL cannot be analyzed as being composed of smaller, meaningless units.
[10] It seemed that the ABSL speakers were "aiming for an iconic and holistic prototype" when producing a sign rather than adhering to strictly defined features, which is what one would expect from a language with a phonology.
However, within households that have fluent deaf or hearing signers the signs have a much more conventionalized agreed-upon form.
For example, the sign for "man" is formed by the curling of the finger in the shape of a moustache although Bedouin men no longer wear them.