North Korean Sign Language: A Possible Influence from Korean and Japanese Sign
Languages
This would be a very first study on North Korean Sign Language (NKSL), as far as I know.
The status, or even the existence, of a signed language in North Korea is very little known, in
particular, to the West. In the meantime, I happened to get a duplicate copy of a NKSL
dictionary, entitled “son mal sa jeon” (손말 사전), which literally means “hand language
dictionary,” as well as a duplicate copy of a NKSL textbook, entitled “son mal hak seup”
(손말 학습), which literally means “hand language learning.” In this study, I compare the
vocabulary items of NKSL with those of Korean Sign Language (KSL) and those of Japanese
Sign Language (JSL).
In my previous studies, I have argued for the close relationship among JSL, KSL, and Taiwan
Sign Language (TSL), and have concluded that such closeness was due to the Japanese
colonial occupation of Taiwan and Korea, among others. Japan occupied Taiwan from 1895
and Korea (the whole peninsula) from 1910, until 1945 when it was defeated in World War
II. During the occupation, the then Japanese government established schools for the deaf in
Seoul in 1913, Tainan in 1915, and Taipei in 1917 (the Pyongyang School for the Deaf and
Blind was already established in 1909 by Rosetta Sherwood Hall before the occupation), and
sent Japanese teachers to those schools. Considering the current similarity in vocabulary
items among the three East Asian sign languages, it seems that those Japanese teachers used
JSL in the instruction and that the JSL vocabulary influenced the vocabulary of both TSL and
KSL. Since Korea was divided in 1948, it can also be thought that the vocabulary of NKSL
was also influenced by KSL and JSL.
In this study, I considered to what extent NKSL was lexically similar to KSL, the language
that was thought to have the shared source, and to JSL, the one that was thought to affect the
establishment of NKSL (and KSL). Following McKee and Kennedy (2000), I used four
phonological parameters (handshape, palm orientation, movement, and location), as well as
the number of hands involved in the production of a sign (i.e., one-handed versus twohanded, or loss or addition of a hand), to analyze and distinguish signs. Signs were
classified into three categories: phonologically identical, phonologically distinct, and
phonologically similarly-articulated. I also followed Guerra Currie, Meier, and Walters’s
(2002) criteria to classify signs into these categories. For phonologically identical signs, all
the parameters mentioned above must be identical between the sign forms, and the signs must
share the same meaning; signs were identified as phonologically similarly-articulated if they
share the same meaning and only one difference between them is observed in any of the five
parameters; and all other signs were regarded as phonologically distinct. The preliminary
research using basic 100 signs (Woodward 2000) showed that NKSL and KSL were closely
related with more than 70% shared vocabulary, whose rate is much higher than the JSL-KSL
lexical comparison with approximately 50% shared vocabulary.
References (without mine which I decided not to include in order not to reveal the identity):
Guerra Currie, Anne-Marie P., Richard P. Meier, and Keith Walters (2002). “A
crosslinguistic examination of four signed languages.” In: Meier, Richard P., Kearsy
Cormier, and David Quinto-Pozos (eds.), Modality and structure in signed and
spoken languages, pp. 224-236. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University
Press.
McKee, David, and Graeme Kennedy (2000). “Lexical Comparisons of Signs from
American, Australian, British, and New Zealand Sign Languages.” In: Emmorey,
Karen, and Harlan Lane (eds.), The Signs of Language Revisited: An Anthology to
Honor Ursula Bellugi and Edward Klima, pp. 49-76. Mahwah and London:
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Woodward, James (2000). “Sign Languages and Sign Language Families in Thailand and
Viet Nam.” In: Emmorey, Karen, and Harlan Lane (eds.), The Signs of Language
Revisited: An Anthology to Honor Ursula Bellugi and Edward Klima, pp. 23-47.
Mahwah and London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.