Ka'apor Sign Language (also known as Urubu Sign Language or Urubu–Ka'apor Sign Language, although these are pejorative) was a

village sign language A village sign language, or village sign, also known as a shared sign language, is a local indigenous sign language used by both deaf and hearing in an area with a high incidence of congenital deafness. Meir ''et al.'' define a village sign languag ...

used by the small community of

Ka'apor The Ka'apor are an indigenous people of Brazil. They live on a protected reserve in the state of Maranhão. They were the subject of a book by anthropologist Dr. William Balée in an exhaustive study of their ethnobotany lifeways and the histo ...

people in the Brazilian state of

Maranhão Maranhão () is a state in Brazil. Located in the country's Northeast Region, it has a population of about 7 million and an area of . Clockwise from north, it borders on the Atlantic Ocean for 2,243 km and the states of Piauí, Tocantins and ...

. Linguist Jim Kakumasu observed in 1968 that the number of deaf people in the community was 7 out of a population of about 500. This relatively high ratio of deafness (1 in 75) led to both hearing and deaf members of the community using the language, and most hearing children grow up bilingual in the spoken and signed languages. The current state of the language is unknown. Other Indigenous tribes in the region have also been reported to use sign languages, and to communicate between themselves using sign language pidgins. Notable features of Ka'apor Sign Language are its object–subject–verb

word order In linguistics, word order (also known as linear order) is the order of the syntactic constituents of a language. Word order typology studies it from a cross-linguistic perspective, and examines how different languages employ different orders. C ...

, and its locating of the past in front of the signer and the future behind, in contrast to sign languages of European origin, including American Sign Language,

Auslan Auslan () is the majority sign language of the Australian Deaf community. The term ''Auslan'' is a portmanteau of "Australian Sign Language", coined by Trevor Johnston in the 1980s, although the language itself is much older. Auslan is relat ...

and

New Zealand Sign Language New Zealand Sign Language or NZSL ( mi, te reo Turi) is the main language of the deaf community in New Zealand. It became an official language of New Zealand in April 2006 under the New Zealand Sign Language Act 2006. The purpose of the act was ...

. This may represent a

world view A worldview or world-view or ''Weltanschauung'' is the fundamental cognitive orientation of an individual or society encompassing the whole of the individual's or society's knowledge, culture, and point of view. A worldview can include natural ...

of the past as something visible, and the future as unknowable. Kakumasu noted several features which sign language linguists today recognise as common to other sign languages, such as the use of

name sign In deaf culture and sign language, a sign name (or a name sign) is a special sign that is used to uniquely identify a person (a name). American Sign Language In the American deaf community and American Sign Language (ASL), there are cultural ...

s. Conditional and imperative grammatical moods are marked by non-manual features such as a widening of the eyes and tensing of facial muscles. Questions are marked with a question sign either before or after the clause, described as "a motion of the index finger towards the referent (addressee) with a slight wrist twist."

References

* Ferreiro-Brito, L.(1983). ''A Comparative Study of Signs for Time and Space in São Paulo and Urubu-Kaapor Sign Language'', in W. Stokoe & V. Volterra (eds.), SLPR' 83. Proceedings of the 3rd. International Symposium on Sign Language Research, Rome, June 22–26, 1983, Rome & SiverSpring: CNR & Linstok Press. Sign languages of Brazil Village sign languages Endangered sign language isolates {{Sign-lang-stub

See also

References