Koniya Sign Language
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| This article includes a list of references, related reading, or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. (May 2014) |
| Amami Island Sign | |
|---|---|
| Amami Oshima Sign | |
| Native to | Japan |
| Region | Amami Oshima |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | None (mis) |
| Glottolog | amam1247 |
Amami Island Sign, or Amami Oshima Sign (Amami O Shima Sign, AOSL), is a village sign language, or group of languages, on Amami Oshima, the largest island in the Amami Islands of Japan. In Koniya region of 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.
References
- 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