Koniya Sign, or Amami Oshima Sign (AOSL), 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 langua ...
, or group of languages, on
Amami Ōshima
, also known as Amami, is the largest island in the Amami archipelago between Kyūshū and Okinawa. It is one of the Satsunan Islands.
The island, 712.35 km2 in area, has a population of approximately 73,000 people. Administratively it is ...
, the largest island in the
Amami Islands
The The name ''Amami-guntō'' was standardized on February 15, 2010. Prior to that, another name, ''Amami shotō'' (奄美諸島), was also used. is an archipelago in the Satsunan Islands, which is part of the Ryukyu Islands, and is southwest o ...
of
Japan. In the region of on the island, there exist a high incidence of congenital deafness, which is dominant and tends to run in a few families; moreover, the difficulty of the terrain has kept these families largely separated, so that there is extreme lexical geographical diversity across the island, and AOSL is therefore perhaps not a single language.
See also
*
Ted Supalla
Ted Supalla is a deaf linguist whose research centers on sign language in its developmental and global context, including studies of the grammatical structure and evolution of American Sign Language and other sign languages.
Previously at the Uni ...
*
Japanese Sign Language
, also known by the acronym JSL, is the dominant sign language in Japan and is a complete natural language, distinct from but influenced by the spoken Japanese language.
Population
There are 304,000 Deaf and Hard of Hearing people who are abov ...
*
Miyakubo Sign Language
Miyakubo Sign Language, also known as Ehime-Oshima Sign Language, is a village sign language of Ōshima Island in the western Inland Sea of Japan. In the town of Miyakubo on the island, there exist a high incidence of congenital deafness. Thre ...
Bibliography
*Osugi, Yutaka; Ted Supalla; and Rebecca Webb (1999). "The use of word elicitation to identify distinctive gestural systems on Amami Island." ''Sign Language & Linguistics'', 2:1:87–112
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Village sign languages
Sign languages of Japan
Amami culture