Jamaican Country Sign Language, also Country Sign, or Konchri Sain (KS) in

Jamaican Patois Jamaican Patois (; locally rendered Patwah and called Jamaican Creole by linguists) is an English-based creole language with influences from West African, Arawak, Spanish and other languages, spoken primarily in Jamaica and among the Jamaican ...

, is an indigenous

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 langu ...

Jamaica Jamaica is an island country in the Caribbean Sea and the West Indies. At , it is the third-largest island—after Cuba and Hispaniola—of the Greater Antilles and the Caribbean. Jamaica lies about south of Cuba, west of Hispaniola (the is ...

. It is used by a small number of Deaf and hearing Jamaicans, spread over several communities in the rural south-western parish of St. Elizabeth. The introduction of formal education for the St. Elizabeth deaf in 1975 by American Mennonite missionaries introduced two additional signed systems which have negatively affected KS:

Signed English Manually Coded English (MCE) is an umbrella term referring to a number of invented manual codes intended to visually represent the exact grammar and morphology of spoken English. Different codes of MCE vary in the levels of adherence to spoken ...

and

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 and most of Anglophone Canadians, Anglophone Canada. ASL is a complete and organized visual language that i ...

. School officials strongly discouraged the use of the language inside and outside the classroom, resulting in a significant reduction in the number of fluent KS signers and a dramatic decline in the language's prestige. Thus, by 1985, KS was used primarily by elderly monolingual Deaf community members, while other community members used Jamaican Sign Language, a

dialect A dialect is a Variety (linguistics), variety of language spoken by a particular group of people. This may include dominant and standard language, standardized varieties as well as Vernacular language, vernacular, unwritten, or non-standardize ...

. In 2007 it was estimated that the language would become extinct in the next twenty to thirty years, if deliberate effort was not taken to save it by means of an effective language planning strategy. The

University of the West Indies The University of the West Indies (UWI), originally University College of the West Indies, is a public university system established to serve the higher education needs of the residents of 18 English-speaking countries and territories in t ...

in conjunction with the University of Central London had already begun working on a

language documentation Language documentation (also: documentary linguistics) is a subfield of linguistics which aims to describe the grammar and use of human languages. It aims to provide a comprehensive record of the linguistic practices characteristic of a given speec ...

project for the language. A 2011 sociolinguistic survey reported that there were deaf adult KS signers on the island in 2009.Parks, Epley, et al., (2011:10)

Notes

References

*Cumberbatch, Keren., Adone, Dany., et al. (2012)
''Colour signs in two indigenous sign languages.''
In "Sign Languages in Village Communities: Subtitle: Anthropological and Linguistic Insights," edited by Connie De Vos and Ulrike Zeshan, pp. 53–86. (Series Title: Sign Language Typology 4). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. Available (in part) online: google books. *Cumberbatch, Keren., (2012)
"Sociolinguistic sketch of Konchri Sain."
In ''Sign Languages in Village Communities: Subtitle: Anthropological and Linguistic Insights'', edited by Connie De Vos and Ulrike Zeshan, pp. 387–394. (Series Title: Sign Language Typology 4). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. *Parks, Elizabeth., Epley, Christina., et al. (2011)
''A Sociolinguistic Profile of the Jamaican Deaf Community.''
SIL International. SIL Electronic Survey. * Zeshan, Ulrike. (2007). ''The ethics of documenting sign languages in village communities.'' In Peter K. Austin, Oliver Bond & David Nathan (eds
''Proceedings of Conference on Language Documentation and Linguistic Theory.''
London: SOAS. pp. 269–279. *Dolman, D., (1986)

In "Sign Language Studies." no 52. pp 235–242. *Dolman, D., (1985).
"The Language of St. Elizabeth's Deaf Community."
In ''Jamaica Journal.'' 18(4). pp 10–15.

External links

Ethnologue Entry on Konchri Sain

Map of St. Elizabeth Parish

The Jamaica Association for the Deaf's KS page
{{sign language navigation Language isolates of North America Endangered sign language isolates Sign languages of Jamaica Village sign languages