Turkish Sign Language
Deaf sign language of Turkey
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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 to | Turkey, Northern Cyprus |
| Signers | 250,000 (2021)[1] |
Early form | Possibly from Ottoman Sign Language
|
| 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. It also uses the tongue in certain phrases.
Grammar
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
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
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.
