Koniya Sign Language

Koniya Sign (Japanese: 古仁屋手話, romanized: Koniya 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 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.

Koniya Sign
Amami Ōshima Sign
Native to	Japan
Region	Amami Ōshima
Native speakers	4 (2020)
Language family	village sign
Language codes
ISO 639-3	jks
Glottolog	amam1247

See also

• Ted Supalla
• Japanese Sign Language
• Miyakubo Sign Language

Bibliography

• Osugi, Yutaka; Supalla, Ted; Webb, Rebecca (1999). "The use of word elicitation to identify distinctive gestural systems on Amami Island". Sign Language & Linguistics. 2 (1): 87–112. doi:10.1075/sll.2.1.12osu.