Adamorobe sign language

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Adamorobe sign language

Spoken in

Ghana , only in Adamorobe
speaker 1,400 - 3,400
Linguistic
classification
Official status
Official language in one of the national languages ​​of Ghana
Language codes
ISO 639 -1

-

ISO 639 -2

sgn (sign languages)

ISO 639-3

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The Adamorobe sign language is an independent sign language that is used exclusively by the local population of the village of Adamorobe in the West African country of Ghana .

history

In the village of Adamorobe, which is located in the east of Ghana and almost 30  km north of the capital Accra , there is an above-average incidence of deaf people due to a change in genes in the population . The inhabitants belong to the Akan ethnic group . The figures for the proportion of deaf people in the total local population vary between 2% (Victoria Nyst) and 15%. Adamorobe has one of the highest proportions of deaf people in Ghana and arguably all of Africa. Some sources assume that in the past 60% deaf people were in the village population.

The Adamorobe sign language is also used by hearing residents of the place in which the deaf are basically fully integrated. The occurrence of the gene that causes deafness has been proven for at least 200 years. Due to this high number of deaf people, the residents of Adamorobe developed an independent sign language early on, which has no relationship to the other Ghanaian sign languages.

Some of the deaf people in Adamorobe have personal and origin information tattooed on the inside of an arm in case they need help and cannot communicate.

See also

literature

  • Nancy Frishberg: Ghanaian Sign Language. In: J. Van Cleve, (ed): Gallaudet Encyclopaedia of Deaf People and Deafness. McGraw-Gill Book Company, New York 1987
  • Victoria Nyst: The Phonology of Name Signs: A Comparison Between the Sign Languages ​​of Uganda, Mali, Adamorobe and The Netherlands. In Baker et al. (ed.): Cross-linguistic Perspectives in Sign Language Research. Signum, Hamburg 2003
  • Victoria Nyst: Verbs of Motion in Adamorobe Sign Language. (unpublished paper presented at Colloquium on African Languages ​​and Linguistics 34, Leiden, August 2004, and at Theoretical Issues in Sign Language Research , 8, University of Barcelone, September 2004)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b ethnologue.com
  2. ↑ Identification Tattoo - Ghana ( Memento from November 20, 2008 in the Internet Archive )