Language Isolate - Sign Language Isolates

Sign Language Isolates

There is direct evidence that a large number of sign languages have arisen independently, without any ancestral language, and thus are true language isolates. The most famous of these is the Nicaraguan Sign Language, a well documented case of what has happened in schools for the deaf in many countries. In Tanzania, for example, there are seven schools for the deaf, and seven sign languages, none with any known connection to anything else in the world. The disregard shown to such languages, which students may be punished for using and which schools may deny even exist, makes it difficult to list sign language isolates the way oral language isolates are listed in the tables below.

Sign languages have also developed outside schools, in communities with high incidences of deafness. Such languages include Kata Kolok in Bali, the Adamorobe Sign Language in Ghana, the Urubú Sign Language in Brazil, several Mayan sign languages, and half a dozen sign languages of the hill tribes in Thailand, such as the Ban Khor Sign Language.

These and more are all presumed isolates or small local families, because many deaf communities are made up of people who do not have sign language–speaking parents, and have manifestly, as shown by the language itself, not borrowed their sign language from other deaf communities during the often recorded history of these languages.