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* Thanks to Rachel Sutton-Spence, Victoria Nyst, Mara Green, Josefina Safar, and two anonymous reviewers for their very useful and thorough feedback on draft versions of this article.
Introduction
"Elsewhere, they do not have this. Only in Adamorobe. The signs here are hard," declares Kofi Pare, a deaf man in his thirties. By stating that Adamorobe Sign Language (AdaSL) is "hard," Kofi means that the language is unique and difficult to learn for outsiders, but "hard" also means clear, firm, and expressive. He is giving expression to a language ideology that is widely held by deaf people in Adamorobe, a village in South-Ghana where this local sign language is used by forty-three deaf people native to the village, and by a much larger number of hearing inhabitants. The language emerged because a "deaf gene" has been circulated within Adamorobe (Meyer, Muntau, Timmann, Horstmann, & Ruge 2001), probably through marriages between the founding clans, starting in the late eighteenth century. While hearing people in Adamorobe speak the main local language, Akan, and other spoken languages with each other, Adamorobe Sign Language (Nyst 2007) is used in interactions with and between the deaf inhabitants in the village.
Because AdaSL is shared by a wide number of inhabitants of the community, I was able to identify a number of widespread and persistent language ideologies with regard to AdaSL held by hearing and deaf people, such as the one expressed by Kofi. For the purpose of this article I follow Kroskrity's (2004:497) definition of language ideologies. He describes a language ideology as a "ubiquitous set of diverse beliefs, however implicit or explicit they may be, used by speakers of all types as models for constructing linguistic evaluations and engaging in communicative activity. They are beliefs about the superiority/inferiority of specific languages."
This article describes and analyses sign language ideologies in Adamorobe, and contrasts them with data about ideologies surrounding other sign languages: shared sign languages, and urban/national sign languages. "Shared sign languages" (Nyst 2012), also called "village sign languages" (Meir, Sandler, Padden, & Aronoff 2010; Zeshan & de Vos 2012), are the languages used in "shared signing communities" (Kisch 2008) like Adamorobe. These are communities with an unusually high prevalence of (most...