Israeli Sign Language
Description by Rose Stamp
Introduction
Israeli Sign Language (ISL) is the main sign language used by the Israeli deaf community, estimated to be used by around 10,000 people (Meir & Sandler 2008). ISL is defined as a “deaf community sign language,” typically emerging in educational settings; therefore, the birth of ISL is thought to be associated with the first school for the deaf in Jerusalem in 1932. The establishment of this school brought together deaf children from different backgrounds to form a centralized community, creating the ideal conditions for ISL to develop into what we know today, and for it to continue to be passed down to the next generations. Today ISL is used in many different domains, including the deaf education system, interpreting services, the media and in the National Deaf Association. Because of ISL’s relative youth – less than one hundred years old - there has been considerable attention around ISL, and researchers have examined it to try to answer broader questions about language evolution.
Names of language:
Israeli Sign Language
Territories where it was/is spoken:
Deaf communities in Israel
Estimated # signers:
2025: 10,000
Writing systems:
Latin alphabet
Vitality:
Stable (according to Ethnologue 2025)
Quick Facts
Although ISL is the main sign language used in Israel, it is not the only one. There are also sign languages used by deaf communities based in Kufr Qassem, Ein Mahel, Al Sayyid, and other places which are less documented. The ISL deaf community is as diverse as the hearing community, with many different social and linguistic backgrounds. A common myth about ISL is that it is “Hebrew Sign Language” or “Jewish Sign Language”; this is not accurate – ISL is used by deaf people from many different language backgrounds (e.g., Hebrew, Arabic, Russian), ethnic backgrounds (e.g., Arab, Jewish), and religious backgrounds (e.g., Muslim, Jewish, Christian). It is an independent sign language with its own distinct structure and rules, separate from other sign languages in Israel (Kastner et al. 2014) and separate from Hebrew (Meir & Sandler 2008).
History
The earliest information about ISL comes from around the end of the nineteenth century during the Ottoman Empire (Meir & Sandler 2008). During this time, small groups of deaf people, Jews and Arabs, came together in Jerusalem and Safed. Little is known about the sign language they developed, but later, these groups grew with the increase in immigration of deaf people from Europe, North Africa, and other parts of the Middle East. In 1932, the Jewish School for Deaf Mutes was established in Jerusalem. The school was headed by a teacher from the Jewish School for the Deaf in Berlin, who knew Hebrew and was able to run the school together with his wife and sister (Meir & Sandler 2008). During this time, many young deaf people within Israel moved to Tel Aviv in search of work. Gradually, a group of deaf people began to meet more regularly, and the deaf community started to grow. In 1943, a temporary board for a deaf association was appointed, and then in 1944 the first board was elected with 44 members. There were also some key deaf figures associated with the development of ISL in the early stages; some immigrated to Israel in the early 1930s, fleeing the Nazis in Germany. One key figure, Moshe Bamberger, who arrived in 1934 from Germany, was the first chairman of The Deaf-Mute Association of Tel Aviv. After the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, immigration intensified. Deaf people immigrated to Israel from various countries, bringing with them their native sign languages, such as German Sign Language (DGS), Algerian Jewish Sign Language (AJSL), and Moroccan Sign Language.
In the 1970s and 1980s, linguists began formally studying ISL. Prominent researchers, including Wendy Sandler, Mark Aronoff, Carol Padden, and Irit Meir, played a key role in documenting ISL linguistically. The Sign Language Research Lab at the University of Haifa has made significant contributions to ISL’s documentation and promotion. ISL continues to evolve, though advocacy is ongoing for broader accessibility and interpretation services in public life.
Structure of ISL
Like other sign languages, ISL signs can be broken down into individual phonological parameters, namely the location of the hands, the movement, and the handshape. The morphology of ISL is highly productive, with rich inflectional and derivational processes — verbs can be inflected for subject and object agreement using spatial referencing, and new signs can be created by modifying existing ones, through additional movement or a change in handshape. Like many sign languages, ISL uses classifiers (handshapes that represent categories of objects or their motion) to depict actions or spatial relationships. ISL has a native vocabulary that is distinct from Hebrew. Many signs in ISL are iconic, meaning their form (how they are produced) visually resembles their meaning — but this doesn't limit abstraction. ISL has a flexible word order, but certain patterns are more common than others, such as Subject Verb Object (SVO) and Subject Object Verb (SOV) (Meir et al. 2017). ISL, like other sign languages, uses space to establish referents, track them, and show relationships between different topics. For example, signers assign locations in space to people or things, and they can refer back to them by pointing or directing verbs towards the locations in space.
Language
A common myth about sign languages is that they are a visual representation of spoken languages. ISL is a full-fledged language in its own right with a distinct word order, morphology, and spatial grammar, different from Hebrew and Arabic. There are, however, signed systems which should not be confused with languages such as ISL. Signed systems, such as Signed Hebrew or Signed Arabic, are often used in educational settings, and they are strongly influenced by the surrounding spoken and written languages. These signed systems are not languages like ISL; they are artificially created and are examples of signed representations of Hebrew or Arabic.
Deaf people globally are in many cases bilingual or multilingual due to regular exposure to both spoken and signed languages. This is certainly the case for the Israeli deaf community. Deaf children in Israel are most likely to be exposed to Hebrew or Arabic as well as ISL, depending on their educational background. Contact between signed and spoken languages can lead to borrowing. There are two phenomena common in sign languages which are known to result from contact between spoken/written and signed languages. The first is fingerspelling, which is a system of handshapes based on the alphabet system in the surrounding spoken/written language (e.g., Hebrew). This is often used by signers for introducing names, acronyms, and new concepts without established signs. When two signers meet for the first time, one signer might introduce themself using the fingerspelling of their name in Hebrew, e.g., the name “Gal,” which is represented in Hebrew writing as “GL” (vowels are often not represented in the writing system), is spelled using the handshapes for the Hebrew letters, gimel ‘g,’ followed by lamed ‘l.’ Following initial introductions, deaf signers often no longer use fingerspelling and instead they use what is known as a name sign - a nickname based on some aspect of the individual’s appearance, personality, or occupation. Another contact-based phenomenon is mouthing. Mouthing is the silent articulation of a word with the same meaning as the co-occurring sign. For example, the sign for “boy” in ISL is often accompanied by the Hebrew mouthing yeled, meaning ‘boy.’ The same sign for ‘boy’ produced by an Arabic-speaking deaf person may be accompanied by the Arabic mouthing walad. Many scholars describe fingerspelling and mouthing as examples of borrowing from spoken/written language into signed language.
Recent studies have examined the effects of contact between ISL, spoken Palestinian Arabic, and written Modern Standard Arabic in the deaf population in Nazareth (Novogrodsky et al. 2023; Stamp et al. 2021). The findings show evidence of what is known as “cross-linguistic transfer” between these three languages and modalities. For example, deaf trilingual children sometimes produce Subject-Object-Verb order when responding in spoken Palestinian Arabic, which typically does not use this word order, showing transference from ISL into Palestinian Arabic.
ISL has also been in contact with other sign languages, including German Sign Language (DGS), Algerian Jewish Sign Language (AJSL), Russian Sign Language, and Kufr Qassem Sign Language. A study comparing the overlap between German and Israeli sign languages found 28% identical signs and an additional 10% similar signs (Meir & Sandler 2008: 220). This overlap is higher than comparing two unrelated sign languages, demonstrating the significant historical impact of DGS on ISL. However, it is not high enough to describe them as varieties of the same language.
During the 1940s and 1960s, many deaf Jews from Algeria immigrated to Israel, bringing with them AJSL. Nowadays, these deaf individuals and their families who immigrated from Algeria are mostly fluent in ISL, and AJSL is now restricted to use in informal domains, with family and friends. Interestingly, hearing children tend to be the keepers of AJSL as they learned the language from their elders and were not exposed to ISL in schools for deaf children.
Similarly, after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1980s, there was a large influx of Jews to Israel, many of whom were deaf and brought with them Russian Sign Language (RSL). Although many Russian deaf people in Israel still use RSL, RSL is in decline as newcomers learn ISL and integrate into the wider Israeli society (Yoel 2007). Because of the strong presence of deaf people from Germany in the first established deaf school and in the National Deaf Association (as described above), it is not surprising that many signs in ISL are thought to originate from German Sign Language (Meir & Sandler, 2008).
There has also been considerable contact between ISL and other sign languages in Israel. One example is the case of the Kufr Qassem deaf community. Kufr Qassem is a Palestinian Arab town in Central Israel, around 20 kilometers northeast of Tel Aviv. As a result of the relatively high incidence of hereditary deafness in Kufr Qassem, a local sign language, known as Kufr Qassem Sign Language (KQSL), emerged in the 1930s (Kastner et al. 2014). A study comparing the degree of overlap between KQSL and ISL found that there are around 15% identical signs and 36% similar signs (Kastner et al. 2014), suggesting that KQSL and ISL are independent languages. In more recent years, there has been increased contact between KQSL and ISL. Younger signers are increasingly shifting in language preference from KQSL to ISL, leading to the threat of language loss (Jaraisy & Stamp 2022; Stamp & Jaraisy 2021).
Due to increased contact between deaf communities worldwide at international conferences, sporting events, and through social media and online chat platforms, there has been increased contact between ISL and sign languages globally. American Sign Language (ASL) is the main sign language used by the American deaf community, and just like American English, ASL has had a strong influence worldwide on other signed languages. In ISL, for example, there are two variations for the sign meaning “America”, one which is native to ISL and one which is borrowed from ASL and in frequent use.
Sociolinguistic Variation and Change
All languages show variation, predicted by a person’s age, gender, ethnicity, or region, among other factors. The origins of regional variants in spoken languages often stem from the assumption that there was once a single, uniform language, which diverged until identifiable regional varieties arose (Francis 1983). While regional lexical variation is also observed in signed languages, there is little evidence that sign language varieties were once sourced from a single language, which divided into multiple regional varieties as deaf people dispersed throughout the country. Rather, many studies point to the emergence of regional variants based on the gathering of deaf communities around separate deaf schools across the country (Eichmann and Rosenstock 2014; Quinn 2010; Stamp et al. 2014). Since the majority of deaf children are born to hearing families (Mitchell & Karchmer 2004), schools (which were often residential in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) served as central hubs for the deaf community to maintain and transmit sign languages (regardless of whether the language of instruction was signed or not) and sign language variants. Since there was minimal contact between schools during this time, sign language variants emerged in these different school-based deaf communities and remained distinct from one another. When deaf children graduated and left school, the use of these school variants became associated with the surrounding region (Sutton-Spence & Woll 1999). Quinn (2010) describes the use of regional variants in Britain as ‘school-lects’, reflecting the fact that schools may be a better predictor of regional sign language variation than region itself.
There is considerable regional and social variation in ISL. Variation can be found at all levels of the language, in the phonological aspects of the signs, the signs themselves, the ordering of signs, and the choice of sign language. Studies show that this variation is not random; it is systematically constrained by linguistic and social factors. For instance, there are several ways to sign the concept ‘chocolate’ in ISL: Signers from Tel Aviv often sign by twisting the fist at the chin location. Haifa is affiliated with a sign of the breaking of chocolate, and Be'er Sheva signers are associated with the depiction of the shape of a bar of chocolate.This type of regionally bound lexical variation is often described as dialectal.
Different signs for "chocolate" in regions in Israel
Age is an important social factor affecting variation, as it can also signal language change. As a living and thriving language, ISL is constantly undergoing change. One example is the sign for ‘television’ in ISL. Younger signers use the sign TV1, depicting the screen of a television, significantly more than older signers who prefer the TV2 variant, depicting the old-fashioned way in which television users moved the knobs of a television to turn it on and off.
Different signs for "television" in Israel
The Corpus of ISL
The Corpus of Israeli Sign Language is a large-scale collection of video clips created and developed by a team at Bar Ilan University, Israel. It shows deaf people using ISL in a range of different language tasks, together with background information about the signers and written descriptions of the signing. Among the aims of the Corpus of ISL are to research social and regional differences and explore how ISL is changing over time. To be as representative as possible of the Israeli deaf community, deaf people were filmed in four main locations: Tel Aviv and the central region, Haifa and the North, Be’er Sheva and the South, and Jerusalem and the surrounding areas. Deaf people were filmed from a variety of different backgrounds – older, younger, male, female, Jewish, Arab, Ashkenazi, Moroccan, etc. In total, 120 deaf people were filmed taking part in a variety of linguistic tasks, including telling stories, engaging in conversations, retelling short video clips, and answering questions related to variation and change in ISL.
The Corpus is openly accessible at www.islcorpus.com. Here you can register for free by clicking on the ‘log-in’ button (top right corner of the website) to access videos of ISL. After a free registration process, visitors can access the data under the Data tab, and it is possible to filter the Corpus data to see people from a particular age group, gender, or region or doing a specific linguistic task.
For more information about the Corpus of ISL, see this video signed in ISL along with Hebrew, Arabic and English subtitles.
Jewish Culture and Judaism in ISL
One semantic category known to show considerable variation in ISL are the signs for Jewish holidays. For example, the Jewish holiday of Sukkot can be signed in a variety of ways. One sign, which is mostly used by older people in the Corpus, shows the structure of a Sukkah (a temporary hut built during the week-long Jewish festival of Sukkot). Another variant, in which both clenched fists are held together, and they are shaken from side to side, represents the shaking of the lulav (palm branch).
There are several variations for the sign meaning Rosh Hashana. One variant in which the hands depict the shape of the shofar (ram’s horn which is blown on this occasion), with a distinct handshape with extended thumb and pinky, is mainly used by secular Jews. Another variant, also depicting the shofar but through the representation of the handling of the horn, is mainly used by practicing Jews. Muslims tend to use a compound sign combining the signs for HEAD and YEAR, representing the Hebrew name of the holiday.
The holiday of Passover (Pesach) has two main variations,
both of which depict the eating of the Matzah (flat bread),
but differ in terms of handshape orientation. The variant in
which the side of the hand aligns with the chin is used more
by signers in Be’er Sheva and Tel Aviv, as well by younger
signers and women. The variant in which the fingertips are
aligned with the chin is used more by signers in Jerusalem
and Haifa, as well as by older signers and men. Passover
evening, known as leil seder, has two main variations
which differ depending on the signer’s Jewish ancestry,
iconically linked to their Passover traditions. Mizrahi Jews,
with origins in the Middle East, North Africa, and parts of
Central Asia and the North Caucasus, use a variant which depicts holding the Seder plate above the head of each person as they are blessed with freedom. Ashkenazi Jews, with origins in Central and Eastern Europe, use a variant which depicts the tradition of dipping a finger in wine and dropping a small amount on the plate, a custom that symbolizes the ten plagues that befell the Egyptians.