Indonesian Sign Language, or Bahasa Isyarat Indonesia (BISINDO), is any of several related
deaf sign languages of
Indonesia, at least on the island of
Java. 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 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).
See also
* Kata Kolok, an unrelated language in Indonesia
References
{{sign language navigation
Languages of Indonesia
American Sign Language family
Sign languages of Indonesia