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Acknowledgements; Introduction: Demographic, sociocultural, and linguistic variation across rural signing communities; Part I. Rural signing varieties: Description, documentation and fieldwork practice.; Being a deaf white anthropologist in Adamorobe: Some ethical and methodological issues; Colour signs in two indigenous sign languages; Demarcating generations of signers in the dynamic sociolinguistic landscape of a shared sign-language: The case of the Al-Sayyid Bedouin; The Kata Kolok perfective in child signing: Coordination of manual and non-manual components.

The survival of Algerian Jewish Sign Language alongside Israeli Sign Language in IsraelSigning in the Arctic: External influences on Inuit Sign Language; An exploration in the domain of time: From Yucatec Maya time gestures to Yucatec Maya Sign Language time signs; Deaf signers in Douentza, a rural area in Mali; Language ecological change in Ban Khor, Thailand: An ethnographic case study of village sign language endangerment; Working with village sign language communities: Deaf fieldwork researchers in professional dialogue; Part 2. Profiles of shared-signing communities.

Adamorobe: A demographic, sociolinguistic and sociocultural profileAlipur Sign Language: A sociolinguistic and cultural profile; Algerian Jewish Sign Language: A sociolinguistic sketch; Al-Sayyid: A sociolinguistic Sketch; Sociolinguistic sketch of Ban Khor and Ban Khor Sign Language; Chican Sign Language: A sociolinguistic sketch; Kata Kolok: An updated sociolinguistic profile; Sociolinguistic sketch of Konchri Sain; Sociolinguistic profile of Inuit Sign Language; Mardin Sign Language: Signing in a "deaf family"; Yolngu Sign Language: A sociolinguistic profile; Language index; Subject index.

The book is a unique collection of research on sign languages that have emerged in rural communities with a high incidence of, often hereditary, deafness. These ""village sign languages"" represent the latest addition to the comparative investigation of languages in the gestural modality. With analyses and primary data from eleven different rural communities, the volume represents the first concerted effort by leading experts in both anthropology and linguistics to capture the social dynamics of ""deaf villages"". The chapters address pertinent issues in contemporary linguistics, such as cross.

English.

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

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