Article · Wikipedia archive · Last revised Jul 20, 2026

Kailge Sign Language

Kailge Sign Language is a well-developed village sign language of Western Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea. It is spoken over a wide region of small hamlets around the town of Kailge, as well as in Kailge itself, in a Ku Waru–speaking region. It might be characterized as a network of homesign rather than as a single coherent language. Its use of signing space is more similar to that of deaf-community sign languages than that of many village sign languages shared with the hearing community.

Last revised
Jul 20, 2026
Read time
≈ 1 min
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Citations
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Source
Wikipedia ↗
Kailge Sign Language
Native toPapua New Guinea
RegionKailge, Western Highlands Province
Language codes
ISO 639-3None (mis)
Glottologkail1256

Kailge Sign Language is a well-developed village sign language of Western Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea. It is spoken over a wide region of small hamlets around the town of Kailge, as well as in Kailge itself, in a Ku Waru–speaking region. It might be characterized as a network of homesign rather than as a single coherent language.1 Its use of signing space is more similar to that of deaf-community sign languages than that of many village sign languages shared with the hearing community.2

KSL has lexical similarities with another village sign language in the region, Sinasina Sign Language.3

References

References

  1. Lauren Reed & Alan Rumsey (2019), 'Sign Languages in Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands'
  2. Lauren Reed & Alan Rumsey, New Research on a Vernacular Sign Language in the New Guinea Highlands Archived 2019-04-12 at the Wayback Machine, 18 August 2017
  3. Lauren Reed & Alan Rumsey, Initial observations of mouth action distribution, type, and variation in Kailge Sign Language, an undocumented sign language of Papua New Guinea, ALS 2017: Conference of the Australian Linguistics Society, 6 December 2017