This article is based on a draft of the joint plenary talk by the two authors at the 8th World Congress of African Linguistics (WOCAL8) held on 23 August 2015 at Kyoto University, Japan. In Part 1, Kamei, a Japanese hearing cultural anthropologist, reports the general situation of sign languages in West and Central Africa. Although most of the countries in these areas use French as their official language, we observed the influence of the American Sign Language (ASL) vocabulary. Historically, Andrew J. Foster, a Deaf AfricanAmerican pastor, and his Deaf African colleagues conducted missionary activities. Through their activities after the independence of African countries in the 1960s, urban Deaf communities created a new creole sign language using the ASL vocabulary, written/spoken French, and African indigenous signs. We recognize that it is not a dialect of ASL, but an independent sign language created by African Deaf communities. This article proposes a new name for this language: “Langue des Signes d’Afrique Francophone (LSAF)”. In Part 2, Yédê, a Deaf researcher and sign language instructor in Côte d’Ivoire, presents his experience with collaborative research in West Africa. In 2009, we started research training workshops for Deaf people in Côte d’Ivoire and established a Deaf research team. It has already published the first sign language dictionary in this country and textbooks in Togo, Burkina Faso, and Niger. If Deaf people continue to be the “signing models” for hearing researchers, the research cannot continue when the researchers leave. However, if Deaf people are well trained and become “researchers” themselves, they can continue to study and use the results of research to advocate for linguistic rights for the Deaf. In conclusion, we show future perspectives for autonomous and united research collaborations among local Deaf research teams in West and Central Africa.

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This study investigates lexicostatistical, phonological and morpho-syntactic features of Kenyan Sign Language (KSL) and compares them with those of ASL. It concludes that evidence shows KSL is not a sister language of ASL for three major reasons. The first reason is that core vocabulary cognates are only 13-22% between the two languages. The second reason is that there are phonological differences, especially those of H2 hand-shape distribution. The third reason is that there are morpho-syntactic differences, such as three arguments and word-order, between the two languages. The findings of the current research project should next be confirmed by comparative research between different sign languages in the area. We could have a newer view of KSL as a language developed with the nativity of signed languages in the whole of eastern Africa.

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This thesis is a case study of hearing child K with hearing parents and a deaf brother. K 's parents use Japanese and Japanese Sign Language as a language of the home. And, her parents are bringing up the deaf child by Japanese Sign Language. K grows up in a bilingual environment of Japanese and Japanese Sign Language. The focus in the present study is the process of mode-switching from a simultaneous mode of using voice and sign expressions together (simcom mode) to the mode of only using sign expressions (sign mode). Concretely, it analyzes whether the linguistic structure of sign expressions switches during mode-switching. It found that the linguistic structure of the sign expressions tended to switch from Japanese to Japanese Sign Language when mode-switching from sim-com mode to sign mode. This suggests that K switches linguistic structure (i.e., code switches) during mode-switching.

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This is the report of how the sign language workshop at the 8th World Congress of African Linguistics (WOCAL8) was organized and managed. WOCAL 8 was held at Kyoto University, Japan from 20th to 24th of August 2015. This was the third workshop that focused entirely on sign languages in Africa. Firstly, we report how it was financially planned, and then how coordination between interpreters and presenters was achieved. We made this purely academic workshop open to the local Deaf community to empower the community by offering interpretations in JSL just like they did in German Sign Language at WOCAL 6.

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