American Annals of the Deaf

In the present chapter of Sign Language, Equal Opportunities, and Sustainable Development (De Clerck & Paul, 2016), we illuminate Africa's enormous cultural and linguistic diversity: A third of the world's living spoken languages are used in Africa, which means that, on average, 40 or more spoken languages are used in each country on the continent. Much as Wolff (2013) has articulated the notion of the "language factor," we propose to formulate the sign language factor to illuminate hierarchies in the use of national and indigenous sign languages versus "official languages" in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Wolff (2013) emphasizes the impact of language ownership on power relations: Assigning lower status to mother tongues relative to "official languages" associated with colonialism diminishes the prospects of success of educational systems in African nations. This asymmetric relationship is due to "widely spread ignorance concerning the role of the 'Language Factor' for sociocultural modernization and economic development" (p. 13).

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, endorsed in 2015, includes 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for the promotion of equality and social justice. Drawing on documentation of linguistic, social, cultural, and educational practices of deaf people and sign language communities on the African continent, here we aim to work toward an understanding of the sign language factor and its impact on development. We follow Wolff's stance in highlighting the role of the sign language factor in overall achievement of the SDGs, as well as the role of African spoken/written and signed languages in achieving "lifelong learning opportunities" and "inclusive and equitable quality education," as formulated in the fourth goal.

Research on African sign languages did not begin in earnest until the 1990s, when lexicographic projects were undertaken at universities in Kenya (Akach, 1991) and South Africa (Penn, Ogilvy-Foreman, Simmons, & Anderson-Forbes, 1993). In the meantime, many dictionaries have been published, and Wallin, Lule, Lutalo-Kiingi, and Busingye (2006) have conducted corpus-based lexicographic research in Uganda.¹ Research into the phonological structure of sign languages has been undertaken, for example, on Kenyan Sign Language (KSL; H. E. Morgan & Mayberry, 2009) and Ugandan Sign Language (UgSL; Nyst, 1999).²

Lexicographic, phonological, and morphological research has been done on Hausa Sign Language, a village sign language used in Nigeria (Schmaling, 2001). Other village languages that have begun to be described are Adamorobe Sign Language in Ghana (Nyst, 2007), Dogon Sign Language in Mali (Nyst, 2012), and Extreme North Cameroon Sign Language in Cameroon (Lutalo-Kiingi & De Clerck, 2015b).

The development of urban deaf communities in Africa has been tied to the establishment of schools for deaf children, which occurred mainly in the "development" period after World War II. Schools often adopted the philosophy and sign language of the founding and supporting country (Barcham, 1998), a practice that explains the contact between African sign languages and dominant Western sign languages, such as American Sign Language (ASL) [End Page 47] and Langue des Signes Française (LSF). The importation of Western sign languages into African educational institutions has raised a threat to African sign languages; "national" African sign languages have also influenced indigenous sign languages. These processes have sometimes precipitated a shift in a community's language use—for example, replacement of an indigenous sign language with a dominant national or Western sign language (Adam, 2012). The concept of "linguistic colonialism" has been applied to describe oppression of national and indigenous sign languages (Adam, 2012; Jokinen, 2003; Reagan, 2010; Skutnabb-Kangas, 2008).