Amami Oshima Sign Language

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

See also

• Ted Supalla
• Japanese Sign Language