Kailge Sign Language is a well-developed
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 langua ...
of
Western Highlands Province
Western Highlands is a province of Papua New Guinea. The provincial capital is Mount Hagen. The province covers an area of 4,299 km2, and there are 362,850 inhabitants (2011 census), making the Western Highlands the most densely populated pr ...
, Papua New Guinea. It is spoken over a wide region of small hamlets around the town of
Kailge, as well as in Kailge itself, in a
Ku Waru–speaking region. It might be characterized as a network of
homesign rather than as a single coherent language. Its use of signing space is more similar to that of deaf-community sign languages than that of many village sign languages shared with the hearing community.
KSL has lexical similarities with another village sign language in the region,
Sinasina Sign Language.
[Lauren Reed & Alan Rumsey]
Initial observations of mouth action distribution, type, and variation in Kailge Sign Language, an undocumented sign language of Papua New Guinea
ALS 2017: Conference of the Australian Linguistics Society, 6 December 2017
References
Village sign languages
Sign languages of Papua New Guinea
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