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Sign Language: Japan

Japanese Sign Language (JSL), Nihon Shuwa in Japanese, is the language used by Japanese Deaf people and is the distinctive and full-fledged signed language of Japan. JSL also has its own fingerspelling system. In Japanese written language, there are four kinds of writing systems: Kanji (Chinese Characters); Hiragana; Katakana; and Roman alphabets. These systems are all used in combination.

The Chinese characters convey the substantive event and Hiragana is used mainly to show grammatical statuses when used at the same time in one sentence. JSL’s system resembles the writing system in this way. JSL manual signs show the substantive event and nonmanual markers show the grammatical statuses of the signs.

Some distinct features of JSL are different from ASL and the other European sign languages. This entry explains JSL’s features in relation to phonology, morphology and syntax. In the final section, the sociolinguistics of JSL are discussed.

Phonology

JSL has different phonology from that of ASL. For example, the movement for sign of ‘shape’ is shown as obliquely downward tracing movement instead of the rotating movement of one’s wrist. It means Phonological axis of rotation is different between ASL and JSL. The movement is very often difficult for ASL native signers. Sign for ‘Tokyo’ has Strong-Weak stress structure while sometimes ASL native signers show Weak-Strong structure when copying the sign. In spoken language, spoken English and spoken Japanese have different stress structure. Now we know even in signed language, ASL and JSL have different structure. These phenomenon show proof that JSL has different phonology structure from that of ASL.

Furthermore, the basic number of mora, which is a unit of time, in JSL words is usually two. The two moras structure has strong implication for invented signs. Japanese Federation of the Deaf get a subsidy from Japanese government to invent new signs and they organize a team to discuss the invented signs for news and class-rooms. The members of the team have been local Deaf association leaders and they are not professional linguists. Once they invented a sign for “Program” with 5 contacts to a Weak hand’s palm. It follows the number of mora in spoken Japanese. However, later, Japanese Deaf Community changed the number of contact from 5 to 2 following JSL’s native mora structure.

The weak hand handshapes distribution in JSL is also different from that of ASL. While it is A, C, O, baby O, 1 and 5 in ASL, they have closed F and open F, O, S, T, Y, 1, closed 5 and open 5 in JSL. The number of the unmarked handshape in JSL is more than that in ASL.

Morphology

Written Japanese has many Kanji compounds such as “教室”(Classroom), “旅行”(Travel), and “身体障害”(Disability). Each of the first and the second example consists of two Chinese characters and the last one is of 4 characters. Sometimes the Chinese characters have strong impacts on JSL signs. For example, JSL sign for “教室”(Class-room)consist of sign for TEACH and that for ROOM. The structure of many JSL signs follows this way.

However, we could find several exceptions in JSL. For example, the sign for the second example would be shown as the complex of the two signs, TRAIN and PLAY while “旅” means ‘travel’ and “行” means “to go” in spoken Japanese. The structure follows the Chinese characters. But the realized signs are very different from the original Chinese character combinations.

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