San Juan Quiahije Chatino Sign Language is an emerging

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 ...

of the indigenous Chatino villages of

San Juan Quiahije San Juan Quiahije is a town and Municipalities of Oaxaca, municipality in Oaxaca in south-western Mexico. It is part of the Juquila District in the centre of the Costa Region. The origen of Quiahije is not known, some people conjecture it might me ...

and

Cieneguilla Cieneguilla is one of the 43 districts that make up the Lima Province. It is located in the easternmost area of the province and is one of the few districts left that is not already completely urbanized. Boundaries It borders on the east with ...

Oaxaca Oaxaca ( , also , , from nci, Huāxyacac ), officially the Free and Sovereign State of Oaxaca ( es, Estado Libre y Soberano de Oaxaca), is one of the 32 states that compose the political divisions of Mexico, Federative Entities of Mexico. It is ...

, Mexico, used by both the deaf and some of the hearing population. It is apparently unrelated to

Mexican Sign Language Mexican Sign Language (''"Lengua de Señas Mexicana"'' or LSM, also previously known by several other names), is a natural language that serves as the predominant language of the Deaf community in Mexico. LSM is a complete and organized visual l ...

. As of 2014, there is a

National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National I ...

-funded study and also a

National Institutes of Health The National Institutes of Health, commonly referred to as NIH (with each letter pronounced individually), is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. It was founded in the late ...

-funded study of the development of this language.Deaf researcher studies emergence of new signed language in Mexico
''The Daily Texan'', University of Texas at Austin, 2014 Feb 26. Non-signing hearing people in the village use various gestures for negation when speaking, and these are retained in Chatino Sign Language. The variability of these signs may be due to the small size of the deaf population in comparison to the number of hearing people who use them as co-speech gestures.

References

External links

* ELAR archive o
Investigating an undocumented sign language in a Chatino speech/sign community
Village sign languages Sign languages of Mexico Home sign Languages attested from the 2010s {{mexico-stub