Douentza Sign Language, or Dogon Sign Language is a

community sign language A deaf-community or urban sign language is a sign language that emerges when deaf people who do not have a common language come together and form a community. This may be a formal situation, such as the establishment of a school for deaf students, ...

spoken in

Douentza Douentza (Fulfulde: ''Duwayⁿsa'') is a town and urban commune in the Mopti Region of central Mali. The town lies 145 km east-northeast of Mopti on the RN16, a paved road that links Mopti and Gao. It is the administrative center of the Do ...

and neighboring communities in the

Dogon country Dogon country (French: ''Pays Dogon'') is a region of eastern Mali and northwestern Burkina Faso populated mainly by the Dogon people, a diverse ethnic group in West Africa with Dogon languages, diverse languages. Like the term Serer country occup ...

in Mali. It is unknown how similar it may be to the nearby

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 ...

Tebul Sign Language Tebul Sign Language is a village sign language of the village of Uluban in the Dogon region of Mali, among speakers of Tebul Dogon. See also *Bamako Sign Language Bamako Sign Language, also known as Malian Sign Language, or LaSiMa (''Langue ...

, but it may be unrelated to another sign language of the Dogon region, Berbey Sign Language. As of 2013, there is no school for the deaf in the area, but one is planned; the introduction of American Sign Language as the language of instruction may affect Douentza Sign. A video corpus has been collected by the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics to document the pre-contact form of the language.

References

*Nyst, Magassouba and Sylla (2013) Deaf signers in Douentza, a rural area in Mali In: De Vos & Zeshan (2013).
Dogon Sign Language Corpus
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen Sign language isolates Sign languages of Mali {{sign-lang-stub