Indonesian Sign Language, or Bahasa Isyarat Indonesia (BISINDO), is any of several related deaf sign languages of

Indonesia Indonesia, officially the Republic of Indonesia, is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania between the Indian and Pacific oceans. It consists of over 17,000 islands, including Sumatra, Java, Sulawesi, and parts of Borneo and New Guine ...

, at least on the island of

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's List ...

. It is based on

American Sign Language American Sign Language (ASL) is a natural language that serves as the predominant sign language of Deaf communities in the United States of America and most of Anglophone Canadians, Anglophone Canada. ASL is a complete and organized visual lang ...

, with local admixture in different cities. Although presented as a coherent language when advocating for recognition by the Indonesian government and use in education, the varieties used in different cities may not be mutually intelligible. Specifically, the only study to have investigated this, Isma (2012),Silva Tenrisara Pertiwi Isma, 2012, "Signing Varieties in Jakarta and Yogyakart

/ref> found that the sign languages of

Jakarta Jakarta (; , bew, Jakarte), officially the Special Capital Region of Jakarta ( id, Daerah Khusus Ibukota Jakarta) is the capital and largest city of Indonesia. Lying on the northwest coast of Java, the world's most populous island, Jakarta ...

and

Yogyakarta Yogyakarta (; jv, ꦔꦪꦺꦴꦒꦾꦏꦂꦠ ; pey, Jogjakarta) is the capital city of Special Region of Yogyakarta in Indonesia, in the south-central part of the island of Java. As the only Indonesian royal city still ruled by a monarchy, ...

are related but distinct languages, that they remain 65% lexically cognate but are grammatically distinct and apparently diverging. They are different enough that Isma's consultants in Hong Kong resorted to Hong Kong Sign Language to communicate with each other. Word order in Yogyakarta tends to be verb-final (SOV), whereas in Jakarta it tends to be verb-medial (SVO) when either noun phrase could be subject or object, and free otherwise. The varieties in other cities were not investigated. Rather than sign language, education currently uses a form of manually-coded Indonesian known as ''

Sistem Isyarat Bahasa Indonesia "Let Me Try" is a song recorded by Romanian singer Luminița Anghel and Romanian percussion band Sistem, consisting of Toth Zoltan, Mihai Ciprian Rogojan, Claudiu Purcărin, Robert Magheti and Florin Cătălin Romașcu. It was released as a CD s ...

'' (SIBI).

References

{{sign language navigation Languages of Indonesia American Sign Language family Sign languages of Indonesia

See also

References