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1 Introduction and Background of Kenyan Sign Language

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https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110765694-0011Introduction and Background of Kenyan Sign Language 1.1Introduction Kenyan Sign Language (KSL) is a dynamic, thriving language of East Africa and is the daily language of communication for at least tens of thousands—if not hundreds of thousands—of deaf and some hearing Kenyans. This language originated in the first schools for the deaf in the west of Kenya in the early 1960s, but also emerged out of an existing substrate of gestural traditions in East Africa (Creider 1977; Zaslavsky 1999; Brookes & Nyst 2014; Morgan 2016). It has gone through waves of convergence, helped along by an expanding deaf school system and social organizations that resulted in a common language used across the country (Okombo & Akach 1997; Morgan et al. 2015), yet with some degree of regional variation—the boundaries of which have yet to be de-termined. This descriptive grammar of KSL phonology focuses on the KSL used in the southwestern region of Kenya, formerly known as south Nyanza Province and now located approximately in the counties of Migori, Homa Bay, and Kisii.1The first part of this chapter introduces the goals of the book, the broader context in which it has been written, and its unique contributions. The second part of the chapter provides a background of Kenyan Sign Language and infor-mation about the deaf community in Kenya. 1.2Goals of this book This book has three main goals. First and foremost, it seeks to describe the pho-nological structure and categories of Kenyan Sign Language, organized mainly around each of the three main phonological parameters—handshape, location, and movement—but also including other parameters. Second, this project at-tempts to make a methodological contribution by connecting the data with the analysis in a transparent way and improve analytic procedures, especially re-garding the use of minimal pairs to determine inventories of phonological units. And the third goal has been to evaluate how well existing theories of sign pho-nology can explain the KSL data, and propose new or different constructs where necessary. These goals are addressed in the following three sub-sections.||1 In 2013, Kenya began the transition from provincial governments to county governments.
© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110765694-0011Introduction and Background of Kenyan Sign Language 1.1Introduction Kenyan Sign Language (KSL) is a dynamic, thriving language of East Africa and is the daily language of communication for at least tens of thousands—if not hundreds of thousands—of deaf and some hearing Kenyans. This language originated in the first schools for the deaf in the west of Kenya in the early 1960s, but also emerged out of an existing substrate of gestural traditions in East Africa (Creider 1977; Zaslavsky 1999; Brookes & Nyst 2014; Morgan 2016). It has gone through waves of convergence, helped along by an expanding deaf school system and social organizations that resulted in a common language used across the country (Okombo & Akach 1997; Morgan et al. 2015), yet with some degree of regional variation—the boundaries of which have yet to be de-termined. This descriptive grammar of KSL phonology focuses on the KSL used in the southwestern region of Kenya, formerly known as south Nyanza Province and now located approximately in the counties of Migori, Homa Bay, and Kisii.1The first part of this chapter introduces the goals of the book, the broader context in which it has been written, and its unique contributions. The second part of the chapter provides a background of Kenyan Sign Language and infor-mation about the deaf community in Kenya. 1.2Goals of this book This book has three main goals. First and foremost, it seeks to describe the pho-nological structure and categories of Kenyan Sign Language, organized mainly around each of the three main phonological parameters—handshape, location, and movement—but also including other parameters. Second, this project at-tempts to make a methodological contribution by connecting the data with the analysis in a transparent way and improve analytic procedures, especially re-garding the use of minimal pairs to determine inventories of phonological units. And the third goal has been to evaluate how well existing theories of sign pho-nology can explain the KSL data, and propose new or different constructs where necessary. These goals are addressed in the following three sub-sections.||1 In 2013, Kenya began the transition from provincial governments to county governments.
© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
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