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
Türk İşaret Dili
Native toTurkey, Northern Cyprus
Signers250,000 (2021)[1]
Early form
Possibly from Ottoman Sign Language
Language codes
ISO 639-3tsm
Glottologturk1288

TİD uses a two-handed manual alphabet which is very different from the two-handed alphabets used in the BANZSL sign languages. It also uses the tongue in certain phrases.

Grammar

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There is little published information on Turkish Sign Language. Turkish Sign Language exhibits a subject-object-verb order (SOV). There is a rich set of modal verbs which appear in a clause-final position.[2]

Signing communities

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According to the Turkish Statistical Institute, there are a total of 89,000 people (54,000 male, 35,000 female) with hearing impairment and 55,000 people (35,000 male, 21,000 female) with speaking disability living in Turkey, based on 2000 census data.[3]

History

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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.[4] However, there is no record of the signs themselves and no evidence the language was ancestral to modern Turkish Sign Language.[5]

Deaf schools were established in 1902, and until 1953 used TİD alongside the Turkish spoken and written language in education.[6] Since 1953 Turkey has adopted an oralist approach to deaf education.

See also

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References

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  1. ^ Turkish Sign Language at Ethnologue (25th ed., 2022)  
  2. ^ Karabüklü, Serpil; Bross, Fabian; Wilbur, Ronnie B.; Hole, Daniel (2018). "Modal signs and scope relations in TID". Formal and Experimental Advances in Sign language Theory. 2: 82–92. doi:10.31009/FEAST.i2.07.
  3. ^ Türkiye İstatistik Kurumu, Nüfus, Konut ve Demografi Verileri 2000
  4. ^ Miles, M. (2000). "Signing in the Seraglio: Mutes, dwarfs and jestures at the Ottoman Court 1500-1700". Disability & Society. 15 (1): 115–134. doi:10.1080/09687590025801. S2CID 145331019.
  5. ^ Turkish Sign Language (TİD) General Info Archived 2012-04-15 at the Wayback Machine, Dr. Aslı Özyürek, Koç University website, accessed 2011-10-06
  6. ^ Deringil, S. (2002). İktidarın Sembolleri ve İdeoloji: II. Abdülhamid Dönemi (1876–1909), YKY, İstanbul, 249.
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