Yoruba Sign Language (YSL) is an indigenous

sign language Sign languages (also known as signed languages) are languages that use the visual-manual modality to convey meaning, instead of spoken words. Sign languages are expressed through manual articulation in combination with non-manual markers. Sign ...

of the

deaf community Deafness has varying definitions in cultural and medical contexts. In medical contexts, the meaning of deafness is hearing loss that precludes a person from understanding spoken language, an audiological condition. In this context it is written ...

Yoruba The Yoruba people (, , ) are a West African ethnic group that mainly inhabit parts of Nigeria, Benin, and Togo. The areas of these countries primarily inhabited by Yoruba are often collectively referred to as Yorubaland. The Yoruba constitute ...

-speaking communities of southwestern Nigeria. Fluent Yoruba requires a large amount of gesture when speaking, which allows minimal communication between the deaf and the hearing. Deaf people in small Yoruba communities use this gesture as the basis of

home sign Home sign (or kitchen sign) is a gestural communication system, often invented spontaneously by a deaf child who lacks accessible linguistic input. Home sign systems often arise in families where a deaf child is raised by hearing parents and is is ...

. In larger communities, where there is a sufficient number of deaf people, community sign language has developed. It is not clear how many times this has happened; the Yoruba Sign Language described in the literature is spoken by 32 women in the city of Akurẹ. (Deaf men form a separate community, though some are married to women in the female deaf community. It is not known at present how similar their sign is to that of the women.) Yoruba Sign Language incorporates many Yoruba gestures as signs (words), as well as the

mouthing In sign language, mouthing is the production of visual syllables with the mouth while signing. That is, signers sometimes say or mouth a word in a spoken language at the same time as producing the sign for it. Mouthing is one of the many ways in w ...

of many Yoruba words. This local language is unrelated to Nigerian Sign Language, which is based on

American Sign Language American Sign Language (ASL) is a natural language that serves as the predominant sign language of Deaf communities in the United States of America and most of Anglophone Canada. ASL is a complete and organized visual language that is expre ...

. "Local" sign is considered inferior to Nigerian/American Sign Language, especially among bilingual signers, but it is nonetheless entrenched; its robustness is presumably related to its basis in Yoruba culture.Ọlanikẹ Ọla Orie (2013
"From Conventional Gestures to Sign Language: The Case of Yoruba Sign Language"
In Orie & Sanders (eds), ''Selected Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Conference on African Linguistics: Linguistic Interfaces in African Languages.'' Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project

References

*Olanike Ola Orie (2012) ''Acquisition Reversal: The Effects of Postlingual Deafness in Yoruba''. Walter de Gruyter. Sign language isolates Sign languages of Nigeria {{Nigeria-stub