Zana Jaza 23 Kurdish

1 Basic facts about the language

Language name: The deaf community uses the term Sign Language or Sign Lan- guage of the deaf. Alternative names: Kurdish Sign Language, abbreviated to ZHK. : The Kurdistan region of northern . Varieties: It is believed in the deaf community that ZHK has three dialects. Number of signers: There is not any reliable source that indicates the number of the signers; estimates vary from 1,000 to 10,000 signers.

2 Origin and history

Kurdish Sign Language is the language of the deaf community in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq. This includes the cities Slemani, Hawler and Duhok,1 where educational institutions for deaf children, called Hiwa, are found. In informal contexts it is usual to hear Kurdish speakers call the language zmani işaret ‘Sign Language’, where the word işaret ‘sign’ is an loanword, hêma in Kurdish. In formal contexts the Kurdish word amaje is used instead of işaret, and thus the language is called zmani amaje in those contexts. The Arabic ishara can also be used to mean ‘gesture’ and ‘allusion’, and the Kurdish amaje is a translation of these senses of the word. Thus, the translation of zmani amaje will be ‘Gesture Language’ or ‘Allusion Language’. In my opinion, using those terms in the informal and formal contexts is prob- lematic, because it reflects the common misunderstanding that sign language con- sists of simple gestures and is universal. Therefore, instead of işaret and amaje I use the word Hêma ‘sign’. I use the term Zmani Hêmay Kurdi ‘Kurdish Sign Lan-

1 The names of the cities Slemani and Hawler are also written as As Sulaimaniya and and other spellings of the names exist on Internet pages, and in other sources. The names that are used in this paper are the ones that are used by the themselves.

Zana Jaza, Aarhus University, Denmark, e-mail: [email protected]

Unauthenticated Download Date | 5/11/16 3:42 PM 568 Zana Jaza guage’ (henceforth ZHK), since the signers are Kurds and the deaf community be- longs to the Kurdish population historically and culturally. It is believed in the Hiwa institutions that ZHK has distinct dialects in all three of the above mentioned cities, but since sign language in the Kurdistan region has never been investigated before by linguists, it is not clear to what extent the signing is similar within and among the three different cities. However there is certainly a degree of regional variation in the sign language, because of the existence of at least one local deaf community in each city in the region. The local communities have contact with each other through education in the Hiwa institutions and some- times through athletic and cultural events. The variation in the language is noticed in lexical differences according to the deaf signers themselves and also according to a published sign dictionary, which is used in teaching contexts. This paper fo- cuses on the variety used in the ‘Hiwa institution for hearing impaired children’ in the city of Slemani. Official population data in Iraq is not generally available, and the Kurdistan region is no exception. Estimates of the total population in the Kurdistan region are about five million, but there is not any reliable source of information that indi- cates the number of the signers of ZHK. In the sign dictionary (Halim and Russel 2002: 5) the estimate is about 10,000 deaf people in the whole region, and in a register at the Directorate of the Handicapped Affairs in the city of Slemani, 1,050 persons are registered as deaf. However neither source gives a clear idea of the number of signers: both include people with various degrees of hearing impair- ment, and it is not clear how many of them master ZHK or whether their signing is in fact ZHK or rather a form of home sign. The institutions in the three cities have together had approximately 1,000 pupils over the last 30 years, and this num- ber might be the closest estimate to the real number of signers. As has been described for many other sign languages the emergence of ZHK seems to be related to the establishment of the educational institutions for deaf children in Kurdistan. The Hiwa institution in Slemani was established in 1982, and since its establishment it has had 348 pupils. The institution was founded by an administrative section under the Ministry of Social Affairs of the former Iraqi regime. It was considered as an institution for rehabilitation of hearing impaired children, but it also accepted children with other types of physical and mental impairments. This changed in the 1990s, with the intake being limited to children with hearing impairment. The period from the establishment of the Hiwa institution until 2003 was a very hard period for both teaching staff and pupils, and was filled with instability and problems. This was not just because of the difficulties the two groups faced in understanding each other, but also because of the successive wars in which Iraq was involved, and consequences of those wars. Indeed Iraq has never experienced total peace and stability since its establishment as a state following the First World War. There are many reasons for this state of affairs, including the socio-cultural

Unauthenticated Download Date | 5/11/16 3:42 PM Kurdish Sign Language 569 diversity of its population (Iraq was a part of the Ottoman empire before the war), and more importantly the fact that its borders and unification into one administra- tive and political unit were not decided by the various ethnicities that had lived in the region for many centuries, but rather by the victors of the war (Tripp 2000: 30– 76; Holden 2012: 53–88). The result has been continuous fights for power and con- trol between the successive authorities and the population on the one hand, and among its various ethnicities on the other hand. In the 1980s Iraq was under the control of Saddam Hussein’s regime. The coun- try was in a fierce war with Iran. The Kurdish population in the north was also in constant opposition to the central government in Baghdad, which was reflected in fights within and around the Kurdish cities between Kurdish partisans and the governmental military forces. The Iraqi regime conducted many operations of ex- pulsion against the Kurdish population, and also led genocide campaigns known as Al-Anfal Campaigns, which was a series of military actions against Kurdish civil- ians (Black 1993). The regime also used chemical weapons in exterminating the Kurds many different places. The best known chemical attack was in the town of Halabja, where approximately 5,000 civilians were killed in a single day (Human Rights Watch/Middle East 1995). The conflict was also reflected in the attitudes of the public institutions towards the Kurds and their language and culture, which were generally neglected compared to the official Arabic language and the domi- nant Arabic culture. Under these conditions the whole system of education was generally filled with fear and violence. This was also the case in the Hiwa institu- tion, which received education programmes from similar institutions in Baghdad, but the teachers were Kurds from Slemani, and did not have previous experience or training in sign language or deaf education. They had to learn signing in their daily contact with the deaf children, and they also had to develop their own teach- ing methods. Approximately two years after the Iraq-Iran war finished in 1988, Iraq invaded Kuwait and another war started in 1991 against a coalition of international forces that aimed at forcing Iraqi troops out of Kuwait. The Kurds in the north and the Shia Arabs in the south also started uprisings in 1991, and the Iraqi regime retaliat- ed, resulting in mass exodus of the Kurds towards Iran and Turkey. In response to this of people, the international coalition established a no-fly zone in the north and in the south in order to protect the Kurds and Shia Arabs from air- strikes by Saddam Hussein’s regime. This paved the way for self-governance of the Kurds in 1992 (Yildiz 2004: 34–50). The United Nations’ security council imposed financial and trade sanctions on Iraq. In this period until the war in 2003 many international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) were active in the Kurdistan region. The aims of the NGOs were to deliver aid to the Kurdish population as well as to the rest of Iraq. The Kurdistan region was separated from the rest of Iraq, and all financial supplies from Baghdad were stopped. As a result, many international NGOs had a particular focus on development in Kurdistan.

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The 1990s were a very difficult period for the Kurdish population, because the infrastructure was ruined due to the successive wars. There was also a huge lack of food and healthcare services. However coming out from the control of the dicta- torship paved the way for different social groups with various political and cultural interests to enjoy a degree of freedom. Unlike earlier, people were able to gather in public and express their opinions without been oppressed. Deaf people also made use of this opportunity and began to shape their own community. In this period many local organisations were established with the support of international NGOs, and thus a deaf organisation was established for the first time ever in Sle- mani. Local organisations also began to support the emergent deaf community within wider programmes of supporting marginalised groups in the society. Those circumstances made it possible for deaf individuals to meet each other in more liberal atmospheres outside the school, which had been closed for a long time as a consequence of the war. (More on deaf organisations is presented in the following sections.) Thus, apparently the establishment of the deaf institution and the emer- gence of the deaf community contributed to the development of ZHK. Very little is known about the deaf people and their language before the estab- lishment of the Hiwa institutions in Kurdistan. Before the 1980s deaf individuals in the city of Slemani were generally known to be talented and most of them had jobs and were married, but there is no indication that they had much contact with one another or formed larger interacting groups. They were signers, but it is not clear whether their signing was a form of home sign, or a developed linguistic system of greater complexity. Hendriks (2008: 25–26) suggests the possibility of mutual influence between sign languages in the Arab world and Turkey. This sug- gestion is based on historical information about signing at the court of the Ottoman sultans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Miles 2000). Similarly, there is a possibility that deaf people in Kurdistan have had contact with the signing at the court of the Ottoman sultans. However there is no evidence for this supposition, and the city of Slemani was founded later in the eighteenth century, which weak- ens this possibility. According to the teaching staff in the Hiwa institution teaching deaf children in Iraq has a long history. The institution in Slemani received the contents of the teaching from Baghdad in the 1980s. However it is not certain that ZHK is related to other sign languages in Baghdad or elsewhere in Iraq, because of the discontinu- ity of contact since 1991. In spite of a degree of similarity in lexical items, it seems that Kurdish sign language is a different language. It has developed without direct contact to the educational institutions and sign language in the rest of Iraq. How- ever, this needs to be investigated further before anything certain can be stated. Further investigation into relations to other sign languages is however problematic, because sign language in other parts of Iraq has not received much attention from linguists. To my knowledge, apart from the lexical comparison that is reported by Hendriks (2008: 27–38), no other research has been done on any sign language in

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Iraq. Thus, it is difficult to make an immediate comparison, especially if the com- parison stretches beyond lexical items. It is believed within the deaf community in Slemani that the signing of deaf individuals who have been educated in the capital, Baghdad, is quite different. A teacher in the Hiwa institution in Slemani tells that she was called to interpret during a court trial for a Kurdish deaf person who lived in Baghdad in the 1980s. The interpretation failed, since the person used the sign language he had learnt in Baghdad, which was quite different. Even though this is not strong evidence for or against relations between these sign languages, such examples contribute to the general belief within the Kurdish deaf community that ZHK is not the same language as the sign language in Baghdad.

3 Bilingualism and language contact

3.1 Education

Education in the Kurdistan region starts with the mandatory Basic Education that includes nine grades. The grades are normally completed in nine educational years, and terminate with the National Examination. After the Basic Education there are different options to choose among: Two or three years industrial or busi- ness education, or to continue at a three years preparatory level before going on to higher education. Children start school normally at the age of six, but it is also possible to start in a kindergarten class at the age of four or five. Deaf children in Slemani have the opportunity to attend a kindergarten class at the Hiwa institution when they are four years old. It is an admission requirement that the child is only deaf or hearing impaired, and has no other physical or mental impairment. There are eight children at the moment in the kindergarten class, where a manually coded Kurdish is in use. The children are introduced to single signs while taking part in ordinary daily activities, and they are also trained in pronouncing the Kurdish words of some of the objects that are used in their activi- ties. The pronunciation training is not relevant for the deaf children and is hardly succeeded for the hearing impaired children. When the child reaches six years of age he or she attends the school, which is located at another side of the same building. At the present time the school has 94 pupils across all of the grades. The pupils are still not permitted to participate in the National Examination, which must be passed in order to successfully complete the ninth grade and with it the Basic Education. Passing the National Examination is the minimum requirement to continue education, or to be employed in the public sector. Thus, without official certification of passing the National Examination deaf pupils have no opportunity to have any kind of education or a qualified job later. An official certificate in Basic Education is a requirement for employment as a ser- vice employee in the public service sector, if the administrative and the economic

Unauthenticated Download Date | 5/11/16 3:42 PM 572 Zana Jaza conditions in the region permit such employment. The certificate however does not allow access to continuing education, no education being provided to deaf gradu- ates after the nine years Basic Education. This is in part due to the lack of knowl- edge of sign language and deaf education. The absence of legal rights to interpreter services also contributes to the fact that deaf people have no opportunity to attend the industrial, business or preparatory schools after the Basic Education. Official educational requirements and the lack of knowledge about sign lan- guage force Hiwa institutions to follow the same curriculum that is applied in all other primary schools in the Kurdistan region. That is to say pupils have to learn to read and write Kurdish, Arabic and English and, if possible, to speak these lan- guages. They are also taught the very basics of mathematics, natural sciences and subjects within humanities. It takes deaf pupils longer than hearing pupils to com- plete the curriculum; it often takes two educational years to accomplish certain grades in the Hiwa institutions rather than just one as in other schools. The fundamental philosophy behind teaching deaf individuals is to “rehabili- tate” them and integrate them into society. This implies teaching them as much pronunciation and speech as possible. The children are taught by hearing teachers who are often supported by deaf assistants in the classes. The deaf assistants are often former pupils in the same institution who had been employed after gradua- tion. The same manually coded Kurdish that is used in the kindergarten class is also used in teaching in the school. This means that the teachers use spoken Kurd- ish in the teaching supported simultaneously with single signs following the spo- ken Kurdish word order. Usually the teachers use just one hand in signing, because it is easier to use the other hand for writing on the blackboard or holding a book. As far as possible, the teachers use signs from the sign dictionary. The dictionary was originally intended for use by deaf pupils and their families, as well as individ- uals who work with them. However, for unclear reasons it is now only used in the teaching context and is not available to the public.

3.2 Standardisation

Kurdish sign language has no standard form and no systematic effort has been made towards standardisation. However, making a sign dictionary was an attempt to influence the signing of the local deaf communities to become more similar through the use of the dictionary. The idea of making a dictionary was originally suggested by an Egyptian aid worker named Subhi Halim, who was working with an international organisation called MEDS in the 1990s. He suggested that the Hiwa institutions make a sign dictionary in order to make it easier for the children to learn at school. The teaching staff in the institutions thought it was a good idea and accepted the suggestion, which soon became a joint project funded by UNICEF. A couple of years later the dictionary was published. The steering committee responsible for making the dic-

Unauthenticated Download Date | 5/11/16 3:42 PM Kurdish Sign Language 573 tionary consisted of both hearing and deaf representatives from all the three Hiwa institutions and also from the deaf organisations in Hawler, Slemani and Duhok.2 First, they made lists of items that they thought would be useful in the teaching context. Then, they agreed upon which signs to choose to represent the items in the dictionary. In the Hiwa institutions, signs from the dictionary are called the established signs, which are to be used by the pupils. The sign dictionary is actually only a list of signs, and does not include senten- ces and examples of use. It is written for children and contains approximately 2,400 single signs that are partly illustrated by drawings. Path and internal move- ments, and also changes in are explained in Kurdish under the draw- ings.

3.3 Influence from dominant languages

Kurdish sign language is not in direct contact with any other sign language. How- ever, there is a possibility of indirect influence from some other sign languages through the sign dictionary, and media channels. The steering committee that created the sign dictionary took advantage of some dictionaries of other sign languages, especially Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT). Thus, one part of the numerals in the sign dictionary is entirely adopted from NGT. Likewise some other signs in the sign dictionary are borrowed from other European sign languages. Since teachers in the Hiwa institutions are very consist- ent in using signs from the dictionary in teaching, an extent of lexical similarity with some European sign languages is to be expected in ZHK. Kurdish signers are interested in the sign language interpretation of the news that is provided by some of the Arabic satellite TV channels. Thus, the sign lan- guage that is used in those TV channels might have some influence on ZHK. Ac- cording to several researchers (Abdel-Fattah 2005; Al-fityani 2007; Al-fityani and Padden 2010; Hendriks 2008) there have been attempts in the Middle East to devel- op one standard variety of Arabic sign languages. The sign language that is used in the Arabic satellite TV channels is supposed to be that standard variety of the Arabic Sign Languages. It is largely dependent on a list of signs compiled from different Arabic sign languages (Hendriks 2008: 26), and it is “[h]eavily influenced by LIU [Jordanian Sign Language]” (Al-Fityani and Padden 2010: 433). Thus, if there is any influence from the so-called standard variety of Arabic Sign Language on ZHK, then an indirect influence from LIU is to be expected. Especially as some

2 The members of the steering committee were: Naznaz Ibrahim, Sozan Taha, Sayran Shekh Mu- hammad, Sirwan Bahri, Saman Sabah, Sangar Ali, Sherwan Ahmed, Gulzar Abdulla, Bahar Mah- mud, Avesta Muhammad, Halala Habib, Falah Fatih, Rezan Yasin, Yusuf Rasul, Mari Zilda, Amira Yusuf, Dlbar Haji, Sidqi Kamil, Salim Suleiman and Hikmat Asaad.

Unauthenticated Download Date | 5/11/16 3:42 PM 574 Zana Jaza of the teachers and the deaf assistants once participated in a training course in Jordan, and were in a direct contact with Jordanian signers. Actually this contact still exists, and Jordanian specialists in LIU and deaf education sometimes visit the Kurdistan region in order to supply the Hiwa institutions with knowledge about deaf education and to share experiences. Furthermore ZHK is in direct contact with spoken Kurdish and also to some extent spoken Arabic, but it has so far not been possible to investigate any prob- able influence from these spoken languages.

4 Political and social context

4.1 Organisations

Two types of organisation are concerned with the deaf community in Kurdistan. The first type includes the public institution called Directorate of the Handicapped Affairs, which has one representation in each city. Those representations fall under the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs in the Kurdistan Regional Government, and administer monthly financial support for handicapped people including deaf; they also have administrative responsibility for the three Hiwa educational institu- tions. However, they are not concerned with the teaching content in the institu- tions, since they follow the same curriculum that is followed in all the other schools for hearing children. Modifying and controlling the curriculum is the re- sponsibility of the Ministry of Education, which consults the teaching staff in mak- ing minor modifications to the curriculum in the institutions. The second type of organisation is the NGOs. There are several organisations in the three cities. The main deaf organisation in the region is called Komeĺey Keřu- laĺani Kurdıstan ‘Kurdistan Deaf-mute Organisation’. This organisation was active from its establishment in 1992 until 1996. Depending on assistance from interna- tional humanitarian organisations, it had different activities like supporting deaf individuals in developing skills through different training courses, and other activi- ties regarding awareness about deafness, and the needs of the deaf community. It also offered monthly financial support to those deaf individuals who had had the opportunity to contact the organisation. Its activities stopped in 1996 due to inter- nal conflicts arising from political instability in the region. The organisation still exists, and some of its members have tried to reactivate it again since 2002, but as yet it remains dormant. A rather similar organisation is Rozh, which is concerned with the affairs of handicapped people generally, including deaf. Rozh has under- taken similar activities to the Kurdistan Deaf-mute Organisation in the 1990s, but has experienced similar problems and a similar fate. Another organisation that is concerned with deaf children within a wider health programme is Kurdistan Save

Unauthenticated Download Date | 5/11/16 3:42 PM Kurdish Sign Language 575 the Children. This organisation has organised many cochlear implant and bone an- chored hearing aid implant operations for children with hearing impairment. Besides the local organisations international aid organisations such as MEDS and UNICEF also supported the Hiwa institutions in the 1990s. After the Iraq war in 2003 activities of two international organisations with the Hiwa institutions are significant. One of them is called Stichting Soz Fond, which has supported the Hiwa institutions financially in renovation of buildings and in supplying the institutions with furniture and teaching materials. The other organisation is Kentalis that has had a project with the Hiwa institutions in Slemani, Hawler and Duhok. This orga- nisation worked with the Hiwa institutions and the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs for three years. The project offered several training sessions especially fo- cused on teaching and learning strategies in deaf education. This project had a positive impact on its beneficiaries, teachers in the Hiwa institutions. However, it did not continue partly due to difficulties in implementing the acquired skills and knowledge, and partly due to financing problems. An international Christian devel- opment organisation called CBM International has also held training courses in deaf education for teachers and assistants in Jordan and Kurdistan.

4.2 Usage of the sign language in context

Since it is a minority language that is not recognised and is not used in formal contexts, the use of ZHK is limited to the deaf community. Deaf individuals in Kur- distan, as in many other parts of the world, have more contact with each other than with the hearing society around them. Many members of the deaf population are friends that tend to meet each other frequently, work together, and spend free time together. Marriage between members of the deaf community is common and some of them have deaf children. The deaf families have much contact with each other. They visit each other at home, which allows them to use their sign language. Some of the men in the deaf community are involved in manual labour, espe- cially carpentry. There is a carpentry workshop in Slemani known as the deaf car- pentry, where all the carpenters are deaf. The deaf carpenters work and run the workshop together, and they are happy to do so, even though they do not earn enough to support their families. There is also a tearoom where deaf men meet to socialise and update one another on what has been happening within the deaf community. Many deaf individuals are also interested in sports, which they prac- tice regularly and the deaf community has a soccer team. Deaf women have fewer opportunities, but are still active and some of them have jobs in public institutions. There is one deaf woman in the city of Slemani who is a hairdresser and works with both hearing and deaf costumers. Apparently members of the deaf community are confident about using their sign language in public, which is the main means of communication in all their activities.

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4.3 Attitudes to sign language

Sign language in the Kurdistan region is invisible to those who do not know any deaf persons, or are not in contact with the deaf community. This reflects the fact that deaf people form a marginalised group and their language has not received much attention and has not been the target of systematic research or discussion within the wider society. Even though they are not treated badly, the general condi- tions under which deaf individuals live do not provide them with many opportuni- ties to participate actively in social life outside the deaf community. The lack of research on sign languages in the universities in Kurdistan is symp- tomatic of the general neglect of these languages. This is partly because of the lack of knowledge about sign language linguistics, and partly because of the heavy focus that has been on maintaining or “protecting, serving and developing” spoken Kurdish as many Kurdish linguists call it. Many linguists in Kurdistan consider Kurdish as a threatened language because the former Iraqi regime had plans and made systematic efforts to change Kurdistan’s demography through displacements of the Kurds and the process of Arabisation (Yildiz 2007: 64–66). Thus, linguistic research in Kurdistan focuses on spoken Kurdish, and no attention is paid to ZHK. The invisibility of sign language, and the lack of knowledge about it have led to the common belief that ZHK is a direct interpretation of spoken Kurdish. That is to say it consists of gestures that follow the grammar of spoken Kurdish, where gram- mar is understood as word order. This will of course be interpreted to the common misunderstanding in the hearing society that considers sign language as full of shortages and improper expressions, since manual signs cannot fully replace the spoken words of Kurdish and their inflections. This belief has changed in the teach- ing institutions, and the teaching staffs in the Hiwa institutions have some knowl- edge of sign linguistics, which apparently has been acquired through participation in various courses that have been arranged by international organisations, and in some cases through individual observations and experience with educating deaf children. Many members of the deaf community are proud of their language, and com- plain about it being underestimated; they feel that they are not treated as full citi- zens. Members of the deaf community have recently demonstrated in the streets, demanding the right to hold a driving license – to date deaf are not permitted to hold a license. They also complain about sometimes being perceived as mentally handicapped, and they dislike the Kurdish word for ‘deaf’, which is keř. The word has acquired a pejorative connotation, therefore the deaf prefer the word nabist ‘not hearing’, which was suggested by a group of intellectuals a few years ago. Thus, apparently the overall attitude towards members of the deaf community and towards ZHK is a sympathetic attitude. This is reflected in the teaching philoso- phy, treatment of issues related to the deaf population by media channels, and the official stance on deaf education and sign language research. Thus, deaf in Kurdis- tan are offered school, but not education, they are offered very limited financial

Unauthenticated Download Date | 5/11/16 3:42 PM Kurdish Sign Language 577 support, but not jobs and their language is considered as an imperfect interpreta- tion of Kurdish.

4.4 Other social and geographical varieties

Due to the gender distribution of social roles and cultural restrictions in Kurdish society, women do not have the opportunity to attend men’s gatherings in tearooms and sports clubs, and they tend to meet each other separately. This suggests the possible existence of distinct men’s and women’s varieties, but it has not been possible to investigate this so far. Furthermore there are members of the deaf popu- lation who did not have the opportunity to attend the Hiwa institutions; they use a different variety. These individuals are part of the deaf community, and have contact with the younger generation, who attended the institutions, and thus there is a possibility of mutual influence on the signing of these generations.

4.5 The sign language in its political context

The current Iraqi constitution, which dates from 2005, guarantees Iraqis the right to educate their children in their mother tongue or any other language in the gov- ernment educational institutions in accordance with educational guidelines, or in any other language in private educational institutions. However neither Kurdish sign language nor any other sign language is mentioned in any legal document in Iraq or the Kurdistan region, and sign language has never been discussed in the legislative domain. Thus ZHK is not recognised, and deaf people have no rights to interpreter services. There are in fact no professionally qualified interpreters or interpreter services. The only interpreters are people who have learned ZHK through their contact with the deaf community. Those people might be teachers in the Hiwa institutions, who are often called to officially interpret in court trials or other situations in governmental organisations when an interpreter is needed. In- terpreters can also be activists within the deaf organisations. The interpretation is usually not rewarded financially. A few Kurdish TV channels have recently started transmitting news with sign language interpretation, but stopped again soon after following objections from the deaf community. Many of the deaf viewers found that the interpretation was not understandable. The Kurdish media channels lack knowledge of sign language, and have no experience with programmes that target the deaf community. There- fore they often employ individuals who do not master ZHK, and do not know much about needs and interests of the deaf community. Apart from these attempts and some short documentaries about deafness, there are no other TV programmes that target the deaf population or its interests in Kurdistan.

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5 The structure of signs

Preliminary research into the structure of the sign in ZHK has been initiated by the author of this contribution, but this research is still in the beginning stages. It is not yet possible to say much about the phonetic or phonological structure of ZHK. However it is known that the structure of signs is similar to the structure of signs in other better known sign languages. In particular, the basic manual parameters of , location and movement are relevant. It is not clear yet whether ori- entation of the hand and non-manual features are crucial parameters in determin-

Fig. 1: A preliminary list of the handshapes in ZHK.

Unauthenticated Download Date | 5/11/16 3:42 PM Kurdish Sign Language 579 ing minimally distinct signs. Non-manual features are also attested in ZHK, though they are not used extensively. Based on elicitation of a list of 275 isolated items the handshapes in Figure 1 have been identified. Johnston and Schembri (2010 [2007]: 90) describe location as “the hand’s actu- al point of contact on the body, or to the hand simply being significantly near some location on the body. When the sign has no contact with the body, or when it is not located near some part of the body, it is described as being articulated in neu- tral space”. In the above mentioned preliminary study a range of locations are observed in ZHK. Those locations are contact points on or around the head, eye, nose, ear, mouth, neck, shoulders, chest, arm, wrist, hand, stomach, waist and thigh or in the neutral space in front of the signer. The observed movements in the ZHK’s sign are similar to those described in previous research about other sign languages. That is to say the signs in ZHK show both path and internal movements. One-handed as well as two-handed signs are also typical sign types in ZHK.

6 Associated sign systems

The ZHK sign dictionary contains two hand alphabets. One is based on the Arabic- Persian alphabet that is used in writing spoken Kurdish. The hand alphabet was supposed to associate production of speech sounds. That is to say putting one hand on various locations around the neck, the chest and the mouth to feel the vibration of the vocal cords and airstream of the produced speech sounds. For example, putting one hand in front of the mouth while producing the /p/ repre- This alphabet failed to be implemented and has never .پ sents the Kurdish letter been used in practice. Instead the school has chosen to use a modified alphabet based on the Arabic alphabet (see Figure 1.3 in Hendriks 2008: 15). The other hand alphabet in the sign dictionary is referred to as English alphabet and is very similar to the hand alphabet of NGT. The big similarity between the English alphabet in the sign dictionary and the hand alphabet of NGT suggests that the former is adopted from the latter. However the use of fingerspelling and hand alphabet is rather limited in ordinary interaction in ZHK.

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7 Examples of words and sentences

(1) (2)

MOTHER FATHER

(3) (4)

WHITE BLACK

(5)

TUESDAY

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Examples of sentences, from retellings of The pear story:

(6)

ONE MAN GOAT HOLD

GOAL PULL PASS ‘A man pulls a goat as he passes by.’

(7)

BOY THREE SEE HE WHAT ‘Three boys see him, and ask what happened?’

References

Abdel-Fattah, Mahmud. 2005. Arabic sign language: A perspective. Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 10(2), 212–221. Al-Fityani, Kinda. 2007. Arab Sign languages: A Lexical Comparison. Center for Research in Language Technical Reports 19(1), 3–13. http://crl.ucsd.edu/newsletter/25-1/articles.php (Accessed 15 March 2014). Al-Fityani, Kinda & Carol Padden. 2010. Sign Languages in the Arab World. In Diane Brentari (ed.), Sign Languages, 433–450. New York: Cambridge University Press. Black, George. 1993. Genocide in Iraq: The Anfal Campaign Against the Kurds: A Middle East Watch Report. USA: Human Rights Watch. Halim, Subhi & Alexander Russel. 2002. Ferhengi Keřulaĺan [deaf-mute dictionary]. Kurdistan: UNICEF.

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Hendriks, Hermina Berindina. 2008. Jordanian sign language: Aspects of grammar from a cross- linguistic perspective. Utrecht: LOT: University of Amsterdam dissertation.http://www. lotpublications.nl/publish/articles/003014/bookpart.pdf (Accessed 26 February 2014). Holden, Stacy. E. 2012. A documentary history of modern Iraq. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Human rights Watch/Middle East. 1995. Iraq’s crime of genocide: The Anfal campaign against the Kurds. New Haven: Yale University Press. Johnston, Trevor & Adam Schembri. 2010 [2007]. Australian sign language: An introduction to sign language linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Miles, Mike. 2000. Signing in the seraglio: Mutes, dwarfs and jestures at the Ottoman court 1500–1700. Disability & Society 15(1), 115–134. Tripp, Charles. 2000. A history of Iraq. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yildiz, Kerim. 2004. The Kurds in Iraq: The past, present and future. London: Pluto.

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