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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 Canada. ASL is a complete and organized visual language that is expressed by employing both manual and nonmanual features. Besides North America, dialects of ASL and ASL-based creoles are used in many countries around the world, including much of West Africa and parts of Southeast Asia. ASL is also widely learned as a second language, serving as a lingua franca. ASL is most closely related to French Sign Language (LSF). It has been proposed that ASL is a creole language of LSF, although ASL shows features atypical of creole languages, such as agglutinative morphology.
Adamorobe Sign Language or AdaSL is a village sign language used in Adamorobe, an Akan village in eastern Ghana. It is used by about 30 deaf and 1370 hearing people (2003).
Hawaiʻi Sign Language, also known as Hoailona ʻŌlelo and Old Hawaiʻi Sign Language, is an indigenous sign language native to Hawaiʻi. Historical records document its presence on the islands as early as the 1820s, but HSL was not formally recognized by linguists until 2013.
Mayan Sign Language is a sign language used in Mexico and Guatemala by Mayan communities with unusually high numbers of deaf inhabitants. In some instances, both hearing and deaf members of a village may use the sign language. It is unrelated to the national sign languages of Mexico and Guatemala, as well as to the local spoken Mayan languages and Spanish.
Ka'apor Sign Language is a village sign language used by the small community of Ka'apor people in the Brazilian state of Maranhão. Linguist Jim Kakumasu observed in 1968 that the number of deaf people in the community was 7 out of a population of about 500. This relatively high ratio of deafness led to both hearing and deaf members of the community using the language, and most hearing children grow up bilingual in the spoken and signed languages. The current state of the language is unknown. Other Indigenous tribes in the region have also been reported to use sign languages, and to communicate between themselves using sign language pidgins.
Kata Kolok, also known as Benkala Sign Language and Balinese Sign Language, is a village sign language which is indigenous to two neighbouring villages in northern Bali, Indonesia. The main village, Bengkala, has had high incidences of deafness for over seven generations. Notwithstanding the biological time depth of the recessive mutation that causes deafness, the first substantial cohort of deaf signers did not occur until five generations ago, and this event marks the emergence of Kata Kolok. The sign language has been acquired by at least five generations of deaf, native signers and features in all aspects of village life, including political, professional, educational, and religious settings.
Ban Khor Sign Language (BKSL) is a village sign language used by at least 400 people of a rice-farming community in the village of Ban Khor in a remote area of Isan. Known locally as pasa kidd, it developed in the 1930s due to a high number of deaf people. Estimated number of users in 2009 was 16 deaf and approximately 400 hearing out of 2741 villagers. It is a language isolate, independent of the other sign languages of Thailand such as Old Bangkok Sign Language and the national Thai Sign Language.
Bura Sign Language is a village sign language used by the Bura people around the village of Kukurpu, 40 km south-east of Biu, Nigeria, an area with a high degree of congenital deafness. What little is known about it is due to a brief visit and a videotape by Robert Blench in 2003. It is "likely ... quite independent" from other, better-known sign languages such as Nigerian Sign Language, since none of the signers have been to school and the area where it is used is rather remote.
Jamaican Country Sign Language, also Country Sign, or Konchri Sain (KS) in Jamaican Patois, is an indigenous village sign language of Jamaica. It is used by a small number of Deaf and hearing Jamaicans, spread over several communities in the rural south-western parish of St. Elizabeth.
A deaf-community or urban sign language is a sign language that emerges when deaf people who do not have a common language come together and form a community. This may be a formal situation, such as the establishment of a school for deaf students, or informal, such as migration to cities for employment and the subsequent gathering of deaf people for social purposes. An example of the first is Nicaraguan Sign Language, which emerged when deaf children in Nicaragua were brought together for the first time, and received only oral education; of the latter, Bamako Sign Language, which emerged among the tea circles of the uneducated deaf in the capital of Mali. Nicaraguan SL is now a language of instruction and is recognized as the national sign language; Bamako SL is not, and is threatened by the use of American Sign Language in schools for the deaf.
Burkina Sign Language is the indigenous sign language of the Deaf community in the capital of Burkina Faso, Ouagadougou. Deaf education in Burkina is in American Sign Language (ASL) and Burkina Faso Sign Language is considered to be an ASL based creole language.
The Arab sign-language family is a family of sign languages spread across the Arab Middle East. Its extent is not yet known, because only some of the sign languages in the region have been compared.
Gambian Sign Language is a national sign language used in Gambia by the deaf community there. The only school for deaf children in the Gambia, St John's School for the Deaf, was set up by a Catholic priest from Ireland. Dutch Sign Language was introduced to the school along with British Sign Language which developed into Gambian Sign Language, incorporating some indigenous gestures used by the general population. Unlike much of West Africa, American Sign Language was not introduced to the Gambia until much later so the deaf community is not familiar with American Sign Language.
Eritrean Sign Language (EriSL) is a sign language widely used in Eritrea. It developed out of the Swedish and Finnish Sign Languages, that were introduced by Swedish and Finnish Christian missionaries in 1955, containing a certain amount of local Eritrean signs and having ASL-based Sudanese influences. According to Moges 2011, 70% of the EriSL and Finnish signs are identical. Since 2005, the Eritrean National Association of the Deaf has made linguistic purification attempts to replace Swedish and Finnish signs from the EriSL lexicon by 'Eritrean' ones in an effort to create a more distinct, "indigenous" language. This process is referred to as 'demissionization'.
San Juan Quiahije Chatino Sign Language is an emerging village sign language of the indigenous Chatino villages of San Juan Quiahije and Cieneguilla in Oaxaca, Mexico, used by both the deaf and some of the hearing population. It is apparently unrelated to Mexican Sign Language. As of 2014, there is a National Science Foundation-funded study and also a National Institutes of Health-funded study of the development of this language.
Prior to 1956, the only deaf schools in Africa were in Egypt and South Africa. Andrew Foster brought American Sign Language (ASL), and deaf schools to Africa in 1956. After Andrew Foster's death in 1986, deaf schools have continued to vary and spread across Africa.
Yoruba Sign Language (YSL) is an indigenous sign language of the deaf community in Yoruba-speaking communities of southwestern Nigeria.
Douentza Sign Language, or Dogon Sign Language is a community sign language spoken in Douentza and neighboring communities in the Dogon country in Mali. It is unknown how similar it may be to the nearby village sign language, Tebul Sign Language, but it may be unrelated to another sign language of the Dogon region, Berbey Sign Language. As of 2013, there is no school for the deaf in the area, but one is planned; the introduction of American Sign Language as the language of instruction may affect Douentza Sign. A video corpus has been collected by the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics to document the pre-contact form of the language.
American Sign Language (ASL) developed in the United States and Canada, but has spread around the world. Local varieties have developed in many countries, but there is little research on which should be considered dialects of ASL and which have diverged to the point of being distinct languages.
Sinasian Sign Language (SSSL) is a village sign language of the Sinasina valley in Chimbu Province, Papua New Guinea. This language is used by approximately 3 deaf and 50 hearing individuals, including members of the Kere community. SSSL was first encountered and reported by linguists in 2016. Documentation efforts are ongoing.
References
- ↑ Tunisian Sign Language at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
- ↑ "8 Deaf Villages Around the World and How They Came to be". 6 November 2016.
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