Koniya Sign Language

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(Redirected from Amami Island Sign Language)
Koniya Sign
Amami Oshima Sign
Native toJapan
RegionAmami Ōshima
Native speakers
4 (2020)[1]
Language codes
ISO 639-3jks
Glottologamam1247

Koniya Sign, or Amami Oshima Sign (AOSL), is a village sign language, or group of languages, on Amami Ōshima, the largest island in the Amami Islands of Japan. In the region of Koniya [ja] 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[edit]

Bibliography[edit]

  • 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
  1. ^ Koniya Sign at Ethnologue (25th ed., 2022) Closed access icon