Sign language: India

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Indian Sign Language dictionary

2021

Shobita Dhar, February 22, 2021: The Times of India

Netflix” is a tap with two fingers on the palm and then a sweeping N, “5G” is five fingers and then a fist, and “video call” is a quick circle around an ear and then a calling sign. Included in the third edition of the Indian Sign Language (ISL) dictionary, launched this week, are terms relevant to the times — social media, relationships and political parties.

The 2021 edition adds 4,000 signs to the previous repository of 6,000. The new dictionary includes 1,300 everyday terms, over 1,000 academic terms, 800 agricultural terms, 500 technical terms and 400 legal terms. For India’s 1.3 million people with hearing impairments, this is one step ahead in a largely gap-riddled space.

Now, there are signs for “turban” and “hijab”, “hashtag” and “like”, “AAP” and “BJP”, “aloo tikki” and “momos”, and “Tom & Jerry” and “Batman”. And there are now signs for “love marriage,” “arranged marriage”, “breakup” and “divorce”. Among legal terms, “abrogation” made the cut, as did “annexation”, “honour killing” and many IPC sections. “Discrimination” goes under academic terms, along with “exploitation”, “deaf suppression” and the word “deaf” itself. The 2019 dictionary had “deafness” alone.

“Sign languages are natural languages with the same linguistic properties as spoken ones. They have their own grammar and lexicon, and are not just representations of spoken words on hands,” AN Narayanan, president of the National Deaf Association told TOI. “Yet, only 58 countries have accorded sign languages the status of national spoken languages.”

The ISL is not an official language in India yet. The project to develop it had begun in 2016, a year after the Indian Sign Language Research and Training Centre was set up in New Delhi.