Adamorobe Sign Language or Adasl is a

village sign language A village sign language, or village sign, also known as a shared sign language, is a local indigenous sign language used by both deaf and hearing in an area with a high incidence of congenital deafness. Meir ''et al.'' define a village sign languag ...

used in Adamorobe, an

Akan Akan may refer to: People and languages *Akan people, an ethnic group in Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire *Akan language, a language spoken by the Akan people *Kwa languages, a language group which includes Akan * Central Tano languages, a language group ...

village in eastern

Ghana Ghana (; tw, Gaana, ee, Gana), officially the Republic of Ghana, is a country in West Africa. It abuts the Gulf of Guinea and the Atlantic Ocean to the south, sharing borders with Ivory Coast in the west, Burkina Faso in the north, and To ...

. It is used by about 30 deaf and 1370 hearing people (2003). The Adamorobe community is notable for its unusually high incidence of hereditary deafness ( genetic recessive autosome). As of 2012, about 1.1% of the total population is deaf, but the percentage was as high as 11% in 1961 before the local chief instituted a policy prohibiting deaf people to marry other deaf. Deaf people are fully incorporated into the community. Under these circumstances, AdaSL has developed as an indigenous sign language, fully independent from the country's standard

Ghanaian Sign 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 (such as Bolivi ...

(which is related to American Sign Language). AdaSL is a shared sign language which differs from urban sign languages such as Ghanaian Sign Language because the majority of speakers of a shared sign language aren't actually deaf. National sign languages usually emerge for the purpose of use by deaf individuals such as those attending schools specifically for the deaf. This important feature of shared sign languages alters the way it is maintained, developed, and shared. A historical example of a shared signing community is the island Martha's Vineyard (

Martha's Vineyard Sign Language Martha's Vineyard Sign Language (MVSL) was a village sign-language that was once widely used on the island of Martha's Vineyard from the early 18th century to 1952. It was used by both Deaf and hearing people in the community; consequently, dea ...

). AdaSL shares signs and prosodic features with some other sign languages in the region, such as

Bura Sign Language Bura Sign Language is a village sign language used by the Bura people around the village of Kukurpu, 40 km (25 miles) south-east of Biu, Nigeria, an area with a high degree of congenital deafness. What little is known about it is due to a brie ...

, but it has been suggested these similarities are due to culturally shared gestures rather than a genetic relationship. AdaSL has features that set it apart from the sign languages of large deaf communities studied so far, including the absence of the type of

classifier construction In sign languages, the term classifier construction (also known as classifier predicates) refers to a morphological system that can express events and states. They use handshape classifiers to represent movement, location, and shape. Classifier ...

that expresses motion or location (sometimes called "entity classifiers"). Instead, AdaSL uses several types of

serial verb The serial verb construction, also known as (verb) serialization or verb stacking, is a syntactic phenomenon in which two or more verbs or verb phrases are strung together in a single clause.Tallerman, M. (1998). ''Understanding Syntax''. London: A ...

constructions also found in the surrounding spoken language, Akan. Frishberg suggests that AdaSL may be related to the "gestural trade jargon used in the markets throughout West Africa". Thus AdaSL provides an interesting domain for research on cross-linguistic sign languages. For over a decade, the deaf children of the village have attended a boarding school in Mampong-Akuapem, where the ASL based Ghanaian Sign Language is used. As a consequence, this language has become the first language of these children and their command of AdaSL is decreasing. This is likely to lead to a complete shift of the deaf community in Adamorobe to Ghanaian Sign Language. As such, AdaSL is an endangered sign language.

References

External links

several pages by Elena Rue.
Summary of linguistic thesis Adamorobe Sign Language (AdaSL) on Youtube, by Victoria Nyst
{{authority control Village sign languages Sign languages of Ghana Endangered sign language isolates

References

Further reading

External links