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Sign language from Africa : The Language Connection : Features : DAILY YOMIURI ONLINE (The Daily Yomiuri)
The eyes of the 10 participants in a recent language training course organized by Tokyo University of Foreign Studies in Fuchu, Tokyo, were fixed on a lecturer from Cameroon, who was explaining his language and culture using his whole body. But most of what could be heard from the room was the students' frequent laughter in response to their teacher's humorous explanations.
The lecturer, Evouna Etoundi Henri, 37, was giving the course in a sign language used in his country and the surrounding region. He had come all the way from the western African country to teach LSAF--an abbreviation for Langue des Signes d'Afrique Francophone, the sign language of the French-speaking region of Africa--as part of the university's annual intensive courses on Asian and African languages.
The university's Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa (ILCAA) has been offering an intensive training program on the languages of the two continents since 1967. The program offered 108 languages courses as of 2007.
However, this year was the first time for the program to include a sign language. (The other two featured this year were Mongolian and Tuvan, the latter of which is spoken mainly in Russia's Tuva Republic.) And this was the first course in Japan to teach an African sign language, according to the institute.
For each target language, the program featured a native speaker and a Japanese researcher to teach the course. This is why Etoundi, president of the Christian Association of the Deaf in Cameroon, was invited to share teaching duties on the LSAF course with Nobutaka Kamei, 36, research fellow at ILCAA, who has mastered LSAF through his field studies in western Africa.
The course, which ended last week, offered lessons on weekdays for a month. On the day The Daily Yomiuri visited in mid-August, classes had briefly moved to a nearby public hall as the campus was closed for the summer break. The day's lesson dealt with negative sentences by featuring a conversation at a bar, which was included in a textbook produced for the course.
The two lecturers first presented a model of the dialogue before practicing new vocabulary with the participants. Demonstrating the sign for "beer," for example, Etoundi folded his thumb while keeping the other four fingers straight--the manual alphabet for "B"--before twice moving his hand in a circular motion beside his cheek. He then made a similar sign for "bar."
"The forms of the hand are the same for 'beer' and 'bar,'" Etoundi said, while Kamei used Japanese and Japanese Sign Language (JSL) to interpret for the trainees. "You can distinguish the two by mouthing [each word]."
When making signs, LSAF employs the mouth movements of the corresponding French vocabulary, but there are differences in grammar and wording between the two. For example, LSAF does not use articles. To express, "Je ne bois pas de biere" (I don't drink beer), the mouthing can be "je bois pas biere." It also puts interrogatives at the end of a sentence.
Used in western and central Africa, where many countries were once colonies of France or Belgium, LSAF has been influenced by French, but it is different from the sign language used in France (LSF), according to the participants who have studied it before.
"I've found that LSAF's hand movements are quite different from those of LSF," Tomotake Kinoshita, 31, a doctoral student at Yokohama National University, said via sign-language interpretation.
Actually, the African sign language was developed based on American Sign Language (ASL) from the United States, which was brought to the region just five decades ago by Andrew Foster (1925-87), an African-American Christian missionary and a Deaf educator. (Capitalizing the D in "deaf" makes the word refer to those who belong to the sign-language community, according to Kamei.)
Flying to Africa in 1957, Foster opened schools for the deaf in the continent's western and central region, where education for such children was not previously available. ASL was taught at these schools.
"Looking at my students in the classroom, I often found some were confused with French or Japanese sign languages," Etoundi said. "So I try to encourage them to focus on the African one."
Maki Takahashi, 47, a university staff member from Setagaya Ward, Tokyo, began to learn JSL after developing sudden deafness about a decade ago. "I've also studied ASL a little, so I wanted to add an African one to my learning," she said of her reason for taking the course.
"I've found LSAF shares many expressions with ASL," she said. "At first, therefore, I mouthed English words while moving my hands."
In addition to a few sign-language interpreters, the students on the course included some who had never studied it before. However, "It has turned out to be no problem," said one such participant, Kazuo Nishimura, 59, a retired man from Nakano Ward, Tokyo. "Probably because Evouna serves as an evangelist [at a church for the Deaf], he's really expressive and teaches us in an easy-to-understand way."
The course allocated much time to Etoundi discussing his everyday life. Most participants noted how interesting it was to realize that the sign language is closely related to African life and culture.
"There are a rich variety of expressions related to cassava, the food that Cameroonians eat," Yoshiko Yoshioka, 56, a patent translator from Kasukabe, Saitama Prefecture, said, referring to the tropical plant with edible roots. "So, now we know that they eat a lot of cassava in various ways of cooking."
Kamei first visited Cameroon in 1996 as a cultural anthropology student participating in a research team on hunter-gatherers. Having already learned JSL, he also contacted local Deaf people.
Kamei soon became fascinated by the fact that they have a different language, culture and history from their Japanese counterparts, and the African sign-language community eventually became his academic theme.
To teach the LSAF course, the expert has not only written a textbook, but also revisited the country to shoot video footage of Etoundi and a partner demonstrating signs. Based on these images, he has developed a DVD that includes all the expressions in the textbook and a dictionary.
As an expert on sign language, Kamei pointed out a misunderstanding that the general public has about it.
"Many people still regard it as nothing more than gestures without grammar and also believe that it's something universal," he said. "But experts know that it's a natural language among the Deaf, and there are different sign languages worldwide, with each having different and complicated rules."
Therefore, Kamei hopes the fact that a university has added a sign language to its foreign-language program can help the public change such view. "I hope the course can deliver a message that sign language deserves as much respect as a regular language," he said.
The eyes of the 10 participants in a recent language training course organized by Tokyo University of Foreign Studies in Fuchu, Tokyo, were fixed on a lecturer from Cameroon, who was explaining his language and culture using his whole body. But most of what could be heard from the room was the students' frequent laughter in response to their teacher's humorous explanations.
The lecturer, Evouna Etoundi Henri, 37, was giving the course in a sign language used in his country and the surrounding region. He had come all the way from the western African country to teach LSAF--an abbreviation for Langue des Signes d'Afrique Francophone, the sign language of the French-speaking region of Africa--as part of the university's annual intensive courses on Asian and African languages.
The university's Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa (ILCAA) has been offering an intensive training program on the languages of the two continents since 1967. The program offered 108 languages courses as of 2007.
However, this year was the first time for the program to include a sign language. (The other two featured this year were Mongolian and Tuvan, the latter of which is spoken mainly in Russia's Tuva Republic.) And this was the first course in Japan to teach an African sign language, according to the institute.
For each target language, the program featured a native speaker and a Japanese researcher to teach the course. This is why Etoundi, president of the Christian Association of the Deaf in Cameroon, was invited to share teaching duties on the LSAF course with Nobutaka Kamei, 36, research fellow at ILCAA, who has mastered LSAF through his field studies in western Africa.
The course, which ended last week, offered lessons on weekdays for a month. On the day The Daily Yomiuri visited in mid-August, classes had briefly moved to a nearby public hall as the campus was closed for the summer break. The day's lesson dealt with negative sentences by featuring a conversation at a bar, which was included in a textbook produced for the course.
The two lecturers first presented a model of the dialogue before practicing new vocabulary with the participants. Demonstrating the sign for "beer," for example, Etoundi folded his thumb while keeping the other four fingers straight--the manual alphabet for "B"--before twice moving his hand in a circular motion beside his cheek. He then made a similar sign for "bar."
"The forms of the hand are the same for 'beer' and 'bar,'" Etoundi said, while Kamei used Japanese and Japanese Sign Language (JSL) to interpret for the trainees. "You can distinguish the two by mouthing [each word]."
When making signs, LSAF employs the mouth movements of the corresponding French vocabulary, but there are differences in grammar and wording between the two. For example, LSAF does not use articles. To express, "Je ne bois pas de biere" (I don't drink beer), the mouthing can be "je bois pas biere." It also puts interrogatives at the end of a sentence.
Used in western and central Africa, where many countries were once colonies of France or Belgium, LSAF has been influenced by French, but it is different from the sign language used in France (LSF), according to the participants who have studied it before.
"I've found that LSAF's hand movements are quite different from those of LSF," Tomotake Kinoshita, 31, a doctoral student at Yokohama National University, said via sign-language interpretation.
Actually, the African sign language was developed based on American Sign Language (ASL) from the United States, which was brought to the region just five decades ago by Andrew Foster (1925-87), an African-American Christian missionary and a Deaf educator. (Capitalizing the D in "deaf" makes the word refer to those who belong to the sign-language community, according to Kamei.)
Flying to Africa in 1957, Foster opened schools for the deaf in the continent's western and central region, where education for such children was not previously available. ASL was taught at these schools.
"Looking at my students in the classroom, I often found some were confused with French or Japanese sign languages," Etoundi said. "So I try to encourage them to focus on the African one."
Maki Takahashi, 47, a university staff member from Setagaya Ward, Tokyo, began to learn JSL after developing sudden deafness about a decade ago. "I've also studied ASL a little, so I wanted to add an African one to my learning," she said of her reason for taking the course.
"I've found LSAF shares many expressions with ASL," she said. "At first, therefore, I mouthed English words while moving my hands."
In addition to a few sign-language interpreters, the students on the course included some who had never studied it before. However, "It has turned out to be no problem," said one such participant, Kazuo Nishimura, 59, a retired man from Nakano Ward, Tokyo. "Probably because Evouna serves as an evangelist [at a church for the Deaf], he's really expressive and teaches us in an easy-to-understand way."
The course allocated much time to Etoundi discussing his everyday life. Most participants noted how interesting it was to realize that the sign language is closely related to African life and culture.
"There are a rich variety of expressions related to cassava, the food that Cameroonians eat," Yoshiko Yoshioka, 56, a patent translator from Kasukabe, Saitama Prefecture, said, referring to the tropical plant with edible roots. "So, now we know that they eat a lot of cassava in various ways of cooking."
Kamei first visited Cameroon in 1996 as a cultural anthropology student participating in a research team on hunter-gatherers. Having already learned JSL, he also contacted local Deaf people.
Kamei soon became fascinated by the fact that they have a different language, culture and history from their Japanese counterparts, and the African sign-language community eventually became his academic theme.
To teach the LSAF course, the expert has not only written a textbook, but also revisited the country to shoot video footage of Etoundi and a partner demonstrating signs. Based on these images, he has developed a DVD that includes all the expressions in the textbook and a dictionary.
As an expert on sign language, Kamei pointed out a misunderstanding that the general public has about it.
"Many people still regard it as nothing more than gestures without grammar and also believe that it's something universal," he said. "But experts know that it's a natural language among the Deaf, and there are different sign languages worldwide, with each having different and complicated rules."
Therefore, Kamei hopes the fact that a university has added a sign language to its foreign-language program can help the public change such view. "I hope the course can deliver a message that sign language deserves as much respect as a regular language," he said.