Japanese Sign Language

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Please improve this article if you can. (February 2007)
Japanese sign language
Signed in: Japan
Total signers: 320,000
Language family: unknown 
Official status
Official language in: none
Regulated by: Japanese Federation of the Deaf
Language codes
ISO 639-1: none
ISO 639-2: sgn
ISO 639-3: –

 
sign language — list of sign languages — legal recognition

Japanese Sign Language (日本手話 Nihon Shuwa?, JSL) is the dominant sign language in Japan.

There is little knowledge of sign language and the deaf community prior to the Edo period. In 1862, the Edo government dispatched envoys to various European schools for the deaf. However, the first school for the deaf was not established until 1878 in Kyōto, and it was not until 1948 that deaf children were required to attend formal education.

JSL uses mouthing (saying a word with or without making a sound) to disambiguate various signs. Fingerspelling (see JSL syllabary) was introduced from the United States in the early part of the twentieth century but is used less than in the USA. Finger writing (tracing Japanese characters in the air) is sometimes used. There is a system associating the Kanji with particular signs, which is used for places and personal names.

Besides JSL there are also Pidgin Signed Japanese and Manually Signed Japanese. Both of these are signed forms of the Japanese language. The first is used between non-native signers, and the latter is sometimes used in schools for the deaf. However, up to 2002, most Japanese schools for the deaf emphasized oral education, i.e. teaching through lip-reading, and even now, at least officially, JSL is not taught. It is only a decade since the official school ban on the use of JSL was lifted.

Like Japanese (and ASL), JSL uses a topic-comment pattern of sentence structure. This similarity may allow for easier mixing of Japanese, signed Japanese and JSL than is possible between English and ASL.

The sign languages of Korea and Taiwan share some signs with Japanese sign language, perhaps due to cultural transfer during the period of Japanese occupation.

Interest in sign language among the hearing population of Japan has been increasing, with numerous books now published targeting the hearing population, a weekly TV programme teaching JSL and increasing availability of night school classes for the hearing to learn JSL. There have been several TV dramas including Hoshi no Kinka (1995) in which signing has been a significant part of the plot, and sign language dramas are now a minor genre on Japanese TV.

The highly acclaimed 2006 Alejandro González Iñárritu-directed multiple Academy Award-nominated film Babel also featured Japanese sign language as a significant element of the plot. Rinko Kikuchi received a Best Supporting Actress Nomination for her role of signing in this film.

[edit] Use in films and television

[edit] External links