| Turkish Sign Language | |
| Nativename: | Türk İşaret Dili |
| States: | Turkey, Northern Cyprus |
| Speakers: | 250,000 |
| Date: | 2021 |
| Ref: | e25 |
| Speakers Label: | Signers |
| Familycolor: | Sign |
| Family: | Language isolate |
| Ancestor: | Possibly from Ottoman Sign Language |
| Iso3: | tsm |
| Glotto: | turk1288 |
| Glottorefname: | Turkish Sign Language |
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.
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.[1]
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.[2]
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.[3] However, there is no record of the signs themselves and no evidence the language was ancestral to modern Turkish Sign Language.[4]
Deaf schools were established in 1902, and until 1953 used TİD alongside the Turkish spoken and written language in education.[5] Since 1953 Turkey has adopted an oralist approach to deaf education.