When Language Is More Than Sound: Arabic, Sign Language, and Beirut’s Sip & Sign Café

posted on: Oct 1, 2025

By: Layla Mahmoud / Arab America Contributing Writer

Across the Arab world, signing has always existed among families, in schools, and between Deaf community members. But still, it often remains invisible to many hearing people. Arabic Sign Language (ArSL) isn’t just a translation of spoken Arabic. It carries its own grammar, cultural rhythms, and modes of expression. In Beirut Sip & Sign, the country’s first café built around sign language, this visibility is becoming literal. Sip & Sign is using sign language to reclaim space for Deaf people, reshape how Arabic is experienced, and change how inclusion looks in Lebanon.

Sip & Sign: A Café Built on Deaf Culture

Sip & Sign was founded by Elie Hanna, a deaf Lebanese designer who grew tired of cafes and restaurants where ordering felt like a breakdown in communication. He saw hearing servers who didn’t understand him, customers who hesitated to interact, and daily miscommunications that made otherwise ordinary spaces feel alienating. He opened Sip & Sign in Beirut to be a place where signs aren’t “special”, they’re normal. The staff includes both deaf and hearing people, but everyone is trained in sign language basics relevant to café life: gestures for ordering, thanking, and requesting modifications like “hot” or “cold”. Visual guides around the café on walls, menus, and décor invite hearing customers to try signing for themselves, creating an environment where communication is mutual and visible.

Arabic, Sign, and Culture Intersect

Though ArSL is its own language modality, its connection to spoken Arabic and Arab culture is deeply woven into Sip & Sign’s identity. The café doesn’t merely translate Arabic words into signs. It frames signing as part of the living linguistic landscape of Lebanon. Regular Arabic phrases and colloquial expressions get adapted or referenced in how signs are taught, how cues are given. This reflects a broader reality: Deaf people in Arabic-speaking countries often live in bilingual environments, navigating between sign, dialectal Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), and at times French or English depending on region. Sip & Sign embraces this multilingual reality by teaching signs that mirror everyday spoken interactions, reducing the “translation gap”—that awkward space where hearing people feel unsure how to talk to Deaf people, and Deaf people feel invisible when spoken Arabic dominates every public space.

Why This Matters: Visibility, Respect, and Equity

Lavishly decorated cafés and Instagram moments are part of the appeal, but the deeper stakes are real. First, Sip & Sign shows how accommodating ArSL in public life isn’t a luxury, it’s a basic access matter. Something as simple as ordering without fear of not being understood becomes a practice of dignity. Second, the café challenges assumptions that deafness equals disability in a deficit frame. Elie Hanna insists that deaf people are not disabled. They just speak a different lifestyle and a different language. Third, it models what bilingual or multimodal public space can look like in Arab countries where often sign language is sidelined in education, in public services, or in everyday commerce. Every customer who learns “coffee,” “please,” or “thank you” in sign, every hearing server who learns to greet in sign, expands a community of inclusion.

Challenges & The Path Forward

Despite its promise, Sip & Sign doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Barriers remain: finding enough people trained in ArSL, designing signage or menus that work for both hearing and Deaf customers, pushing back against social stigma that treats sign language as “other,” or only something private. Economic sustainability is another hurdle. Serving both business viability and community mission means balancing décor, staffing, training, and outreach. Still, Sip & Sign offers a template. Its weekend workshops, collaborations with Deaf schools and associations, and constant awareness-building are pushing for broader change.

Sip & Sign café stands as a living statement: Arabic isn’t only spoken; it’s lived in many forms. When sign is treated as language, when public spaces respond, when Deaf people shape culture rather than adapt to silence, community shifts. Sip & Sign isn’t just about ordering a latte, it’s about evolving what inclusion looks like in Arab cities. As more projects like this emerge, we begin to see that Arabic + sign language + public life = richer, more respectful society.

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