Etude d'une langue des signes émergente de Côte d'Ivoire: la Langue des Signes de Bouakako

What is it about?

This thesis offers a description of the Bouakako Sign Language (LaSiBo, Langues des Signes de Bouakako in French), that has emerged within a community comprising a majority of hearing members. LaSiBo is a young language that has developed within a group of hearing-impaired community members to fulfill their communication needs, but is also used by other members of the village. The aspects studied here are firstly the formal properties of LaSiBo and inter-personal variation in sign usage; as well as semantic domains such as kinship, colors and time. The size of the community, the age of the language, the influence of the spoken language and the absence of use in education are among the factors that influence the formation of LaSiBo. The comparisons carried out in this work highlight similarities and differences not only between sign languages (used in small communities in particular) – which, however different they may be, share the same modality (visio-gestural) –, but also between languages that are in contact with each other (the Dida language and LaSiBo) but use different modality (respectively audio-oral and visio-gestural).

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Why is it important?

Bouakako Sign Language (LaSiBo) has restructured the way in which hearing people around them express the notions of past and future in their gestures. In addition, the small size of the community, the influence of the oral language, the age of the language and the absence in education are factors which play a role in the structure and in particular on the lexical creation of the LaSiBo.

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