Amami Island Sign, or Amami Oshima Sign (AOSL), is a village sign language, or group of languages, on Amami Ōshima, the largest island in the Amami Islands of Japan. In Koniya region [ja] of the island, there exist a high incidence of congenital deafness, which is dominant and tends to run in a few families; moreover, the difficulty of the terrain has kept these families largely separated, so that there is extreme lexical geographical diversity across the island, and AOSL is therefore perhaps not a single language.
Osugi, Yutaka; Ted Supalla; and Rebecca Webb (1999). "The use of word elicitation to identify distinctive gestural systems on Amami Island." Sign Language & Linguistics, 2:1:87–112
^Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Amami O Shima Sign Language". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
^a Sign-language names reflect the region of origin. Natural sign languages are not related to the spoken language used in the same region. For example, French Sign Language originated in France, but is not related to French.
^b Denotes the number (if known) of languages within the family. No further information is given on these languages.
