Adamorobe Sign Language

Adamorobe Sign Language (AdaSL) is an indigenous sign language used in Adamorobe, an Akan village in eastern Ghana. Its users are about 300 deaf and 900 hearing people (Nyst). Ethnologue reports a total of 3,400 signers, including hearing users.

The Adamorobe community is notable for its unusually high incidence of hereditary deafness (genetic recessive autosome), estimated at 2% ot the total population (Nyst), or 15% according to Ethnologue. In the past, this percentage is thought to have been as high as 60%. Deaf people are fully incorporated into the community. The inhabitants of Adamorobe cannot remember a time without deaf people in the village.

Under these circumstances, Adamorobe has developed an indigenous sign language, fully independent from the country's standard Ghanaian Sign Language (which is related to American Sign Language). AdaSL shares signs and prosodic features with some other sign languages in the region, but it has been suggested these similarities are due to culturally shared gestures rather than a genetic relationship. Frishberg (1987) suggests that AdaSL may be related to the "gestural trade jargon used in the markets throughout West Africa". Adamorobe Sign Language thus provides an interesting domain for cross-linguistic sign language research.