Acceso usuarios
D. O. Okombo, P. O. Akach
African educators and policy makers often (informally) ask sign-language researchers whether it is really possible for a national sign language to evolve naturally in an ethnically heterogeneous country. In our view, the question of whether it is or is not possible does not arise because it has happened. Already, in a number of African countries, for example, Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania, deafpeople are operating in language communities each of which has a national membership. Such communities are based on language bonds constituted by the emerging national sign languages such äs Kenyan Sign Language, Ugandan Sign Language, and Tanzanian Sign Language, for the countries mentioned above. The relevant research question, therefore, is, what makes it possible for a national sign language to evolve among the deafofa country such äs Kenya, which has approximately 42 ethnic groups covering a landarea of 582,644 square kilometres? Finding an answer to this question is important because it has significant implications for sign-language dialectology and sign-language development in general.
In this paper, we summarize our findings on this question äs it relates to Kenya. The key factors responsible for the growth of a national sign language in Kenya seem to be the regional mobility of deaf persons, the growth of deaf awareness, and, at the linguistic level, language convergence and the attendant wave phenomena. The scientific significance of these findings is that there are natural social trends that can be generated and/or enhanced in order to facilitate the growth ofnatural sign languages in the ethnically heterogeneous nations of Africa. This eliminates the undesirable temptation to import foreign sign languages or, even worse, design artificial sign languages for the deaf of Africa. Thefindings also give us some ideas about how to facilitate the homogenization of the emerging Subsystems without applying the fiat associated with traditional standardization procedures.
