Sign Languages in Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands

Abstract

Papua New Guinea (PNG) occupies less than 0.4% of the world's land mass and is home to approximately 0.1% of its population, yet it is host to around 12% of the world's languages.1 Despite its phenomenal diversity of spoken languages and the by-now large body of publications on them, almost no attention has been paid to signed languages (SLs) of PNG. Remarkably, after nearly 40 years, Adam Kendon's (1980a, 1980b, 1980c)2 study from the Enga region is still the only one that has yet been published on any of them. When it appeared, that study was a pioneering one, not only as the first to come out of PNG but as one of the first detailed ac-counts of a SL anywhere in the world. Show more