A language is born – and now it is dying

All photos by Dave Sinai for New Scientist

By Shira Rubin

PAST the glimmering industrial developments and fast food chains of the northern Negev desert in Israel, I pull off the dusty highway into the quiet village of Al-Sayyid. A family of 22 awaits me outside their home, greeting me with sage tea. The children introduce me to the family pets: a horse, a brood of chickens and a camel. Meanwhile, the head of the household, Ishak al-Sayyid, recounts his family’s history, shifting between Arabic, Hebrew and a language I don’t understand.

Ishak’s family have lived here for generations. They are members of the Al-Sayyid Bedouin tribe, founded 200 years ago by an Egyptian peasant who moved here after a family feud then married several local women. Shaykh al-Sayyid’s children married among themselves after being rejected as outsiders by neighbouring tribes. What they did not know was that two of them carried a recessive gene for congenital deafness.

Ishak and his daughters

Dave Sinai for New Scientist

Intermarriage became the norm in the village, and the gene spread. The first deaf children were born in the 1930s. At first it was just one family, with four deaf siblings among many hearing ones. But soon other families started having deaf children too. Today the village has the highest known rate of congenital deafness in the world. Around 150 of 4000 residents were born deaf, 50 times the global average. Three of Ishak’s own children are deaf.

Deafness also accounts for what really puts Al-Sayyid on the map. Over the past 75 years, the villagers have created an entirely new and unique language, Al-Sayyid Bedouin ...