Sign language yet to get with the lingo

05.01.2015, COIMBATORE: 
If you want K Murali, founder of Deaf Leaders Institute in Coimbatore, to click a selfie, you need to describe it to him by standing next to him and putting out your phone. He immediately smiles and offers to click the picture since he his arm is longer, but there is no 'word' in his language of signs to describe a selfie.

With more than 500 new words like selfie, bestie, cinder toffee and aperture stop entering the lexicon, sign language experts are working overtime to find ways to include these in their lingo. Until now, the hearing impaired have depended on descriptive sign language or spelling out each alphabets to use such 'new words'.

"We need to describe and spell out such words because sign language experts are yet to come up with a sign for 'selfie' though we use the word so often," says his daughter Sneha Murali, who acts like a sign-language interpreter for her father and helps run the institute. "While we ignore words like bestie because we have signs for best friend and close friend, others like toffee or Facebook have to be spelt out," she says.

Sign language interpreters say the deaf community has to wait for experts to meet every six months and come up with signs for new words. D Sabika, a sign language interpreter, says, "Disability welfare institutes usually invite sign language experts from across the country to give suggestions and decide on signs for new words. Once they decide on it, interpreters are called for training and taught the new signs." People who can't attend training programmes update themselves using CDs and videos.

Many hearing impaired adults are yet to get with the lingo because the sign-language committee focuses on words used in the academic world especially for science subjects like physics, chemistry and biology.

"We still don't have signs for words like cool, chilling, hanging out, online chatting and surfing the net among others," says K Sivanantham, a hearing impaired person studying at Government Arts College. "We just use old words that mean the same thing like relax instead of chilling or hanging, good instead of cool, and talk on the internet instead of chatting online," he says. "We learn of new words only when we browse online or read books and magazines."