Japanese Sign Language

Japanese Sign Language (日本手話, Nihon Shuwa, JSL) is the dominant sign language in Japan. Little is known about sign language and the deaf community before the Edo period. In 1862, the Tokugawa shogunate dispatched envoys to various European schools for the deaf. However, the first school for the deaf was not established until 1878 in Kyōto, and it was not until 1948 that deaf children were required to attend school to receive a formal education. A... more

Japanese Sign Language (日本手話, Nihon Shuwa, JSL) is the dominant sign language in Japan. Little is known about sign language and the deaf community before the Edo period. In 1862, the Tokugawa shogunate dispatched envoys to various European schools for the deaf. However, the first school for the deaf was not established until 1878 in Kyōto, and it was not until 1948 that deaf children were required to attend school to receive a formal education. As in other sign languages, JSL (usually called simply 手話 shuwa 'sign talk') consists of words, or "signs", and the grammar with which they are put together. JSL signs may be nouns, verbs, adjectives, or any other part of a sentence, including suffixes indicating tense, negation, and grammatical particles. Signs consist not just of a manual gesture, but also mouthing (口話, kōwa) (lit. 'mouth talk') (pronouncing a standard Japanese word with or without making a sound). The same sign may assume one of two different but semantically related... less