WHEN Carol Padden first visited Al-Sayyid, a small Bedouin village in the Negev desert in Israel, her expectations were not high. Padden, a linguist at the University of California, San Diego, first went there in 2000 to study a newly discovered sign language. She expected to find something rather unsophisticated – an isolated group of deaf people who had invented a "home sign", a crude set of gestures and signs to allow them to communicate with each other.

But when she met her first signers, she realised at once that the Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language had made the leap beyond home signing...

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