Miyakubo Sign Language, also known as Ehime-Oshima Sign Language, is a
village sign language of
ÅŒshima Island in the western
Inland Sea
An inland sea (also known as an epeiric sea or an epicontinental sea) is a continental body of water which is very large and is either completely surrounded by dry land or connected to an ocean by a river, strait, or "arm of the sea". An inland se ...
of
Japan
Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north ...
. In the town of
Miyakubo on the island, there exist a high incidence of congenital deafness. Three families are predominantly deaf, with 20 living deaf members (as of 2018), and in one of them all family members are deaf and have been for at least three generations. These form the core of speakers of the language, though there are deaf members of other families who speak it as well. There are also about 50 hearing neighbors and coworkers of the deaf (especially in the fishing industry) who know the language. A number of hearing children pick it up from deaf classmates in preschool. Because
Signed Japanese rather than
Japanese Sign Language (JSL) long dominated in education for the deaf in Japan, Miyakubo Sign was protected from the influence of JSL until the early 2000s. The opening of the
Nishiseto Expressway
The , often called the is an expressway in Japan that connects Onomichi, Hiroshima and Imabari, Ehime, going through nine of the Geiyo Islands, including ÅŒshima, ÅŒmishima, and Innoshima. The road and multiple bridges crossing across the Set ...
in 1999 also opened the community to greater external influence and decreased the level of interaction between the deaf and hearing. Currently the younger generations (born since the 1980s) are bilingual, but use Miyakubo Sign exclusively with older people, who find JSL unintelligible. Among themselves, they may mix Miyakubo Sign and JSL or use JSL exclusively.
References
*Taira, E., U.Yano, and K. Matsuoka. 2015. Miyakubo shuwa no kazu ni kan- suru hyogen - nihon ni okeru kiki gengo
n Endangered Language in Japan - Numerical Expressions of Miyakubo Sign Language Oral pre- sentation of the 35th Annual Meeting of Japanese Association of Socio- linguistic Sciences.Tokyo Women's Christian University.
*Uiko Yano & Kazumi Matsuoka (2018). "Numerals and Timelines of a Shared Sign Language in Japan: Miyakubo Sign Language on Ehime-Oshima Island." ''Sign Language Studies'', 18:4:640–665.
* Yano, U., and K. Matsuoka. 2017a. Ehime-ken Oshima Miyakubo-cho no shuwa: airand sign
sland Signs: The Sign Language of Miyakubo in Ehime Prefecture Science Journal KAGAKU
cience87(5): 415–417
Translated into English
Village sign languages
Sign languages of Japan
Culture in Ehime Prefecture
{{sign-lang-stub