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.

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.