Koniya Sign Language

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

Koniya Sign (Japanese: 古仁屋手話, romanizedKoniya Shuwa), or Amami Ōshima Sign (AOSL; 奄美大島手話, Amamiōshima Shuwa) 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.

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