Studies on Indigenous Signed and Spoken Languages in Africa

This volume is an important exploration of Africa's rich linguistic diversity. The chapters delve into the complexities of linguistic research, preservation, and cultural understanding, with a regional focus covering indigenous African languages. It honours often-overlooked sign languages, making it a trailblazing work in its combination of signed and spoken languages within the African environment. This book is a must-have for anybody interested in African languages, providing new perspectives on language preservation, cultural identity, and the lasting spirit of linguistic diversity. The individual chapters present an invitation to discover, appreciate, and preserve Africa's indigenous languages. This volume, intended for linguists, policy makers, and graduate and undergraduate students, presents a practical approach to deciphering the complexity of indigenous African languages, both signed and spoken.

About the Author :
Emmanuel Asonye is a speech and hearing scientist, and a sign linguist. He is the CEO of Indigenous Hands and Voices (IHAV) and Save the Deaf Initiative and Endangered Languages (S-DELI), twin organizations documenting and promoting indigenous signed and spoken languages globally. He is an affiliate member of the World Federation of the Deaf and runs an educational series on YouTube – Indigenous Hands the Indigenous Voices. His research interests include sign language documentation, speech-hearing sciences, early language access, and early intervention programs for deaf children. Mary Edward is a postdoctoral researcher at McMaster University's Department of Linguistics and Languages, Canada. Her research takes a multimodal, multilingual dimension to language, spoken and signed. Her research interests include general linguistics, Deaf culture, sociolinguistics of Deaf communities, discourse analysis, and the cognitive science of language. She has authored, co-authored, and is actively working on various research publications in the fields mentioned above.

Review :
'An essential assembly of thoughtful and lucid evidence, this book captures tactics that address contemporary challenges of signification in Africa. After explicating the recognition, documentation, development, and use problems of Sign Languages, the studies highlight creative praxis to navigate crises and legal translation, the complexities of language pedagogy, the chasm between naming and identity, language endangerment, and the under-utilization of indigenous languages in health communication on social media. This book is a model for productive dialogue that generates compelling change-making conversations. I highly recommend this volume to graduate students and researchers who want to understand African linguistic and cultural terrains.'G. Edzordzi Agbozo, PhDAssistant Professor, University of North Carolina Wilmington, USA'This is the first time a volume about various African sign languages have been compiled by African sign language linguists who are from African countries. This effort could potentially motivate others to create similar volumes about other regions of the continent. It gives a very good first impression about indigenous sign languages in Africa, which are among the three dichotomies of sign languages in Africa: indigenous, foreign, and foreign-based sign languages.'Eyasu TameneAssistant Professor, Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia'This volume contributes to the growing number of literatures that explain the intricacies in African languages. Ignoring indigenous African languages has far reaching consequences; we are not only unable to adequately describe the structure of these languages, but we are also not able to adequately explain what speakers do with linguistic structures as they communicate.'George Akanlig-PareProfessor of Linguistics, University of Ghana, Legon, Ghana