Longitudinal Documentation of Sign Language Acquisition in a Deaf Village in Bali
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| Language | Kata Kolok |
| Depositor | Connie de Vos |
| Affiliation | Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics |
| Location | Indonesia |
| Collection ID | 0124 |
| Grant ID | SG0140 |
| Funding Body | ELDP |
| Collection Status | Collection online |
| Landing Page Handle | http://hdl.handle.net/2196/a6981929-85ab-4ff4-b2f1-f9de151fddf9 |
Summary of the collection
This collection contains documentation on the acquisition of Kata Kolok, a rural signing variety of Bali, over an extensive period of time.
Group represented
Deaf children acquiring Kata Kolok
Language information
Kata Kolok is a rural signing variety of Bali that emerged in response to a sudden rise in the incidence of deafness. The language has been the primary means of communication of at least 5 subsequent generations of deaf signers in social, lithurgical, professional, and educational settings. It has a number of structural characteristics that are unusual compared to other sign languages; most notably, Kata Kolok signers prefer an absolute Frame of Reference in spatial description. here are currently 48 deaf signers, and 1,200 hearing community members use Kata kolok with varying degrees of proficiency. The language is threatened by the increasing number of sign-bilinguals using Indonesian Sign Language in addition to Kata Kolok, as well as recent changes in marital patterns.
Collection contents
The Kata Kolok child signing corpus was recorded and collected by Ketut Kanta and Connie de Vos (the current depositor).
During initial documentation activities (2007-2009) two deaf children were filmed at least once a month from the ages of 1;11 and 2;0 until 3;9 and 4;2 respectively.
The second section of the corpus resumes recording of these two deaf children at ages of 6;3 and 6;4 for another 12 months. In addition, the video recordings include a deaf child who did not start to acquire Kata Kolok until the age of 5. During this phase of the project the depositor was also able to produce more indepth metadata as well as more video transcriptions.
Collection history
Initial documentation activities (2007-2009) were supported by the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics as part of a PhD project (de Vos 2012). Further recordings as well as indepth metadata and video annotations (2011-2012) were funded by ELDP (SG0140). Currently, longitudinal documentation of child signing are ongoing with the birth of the first deaf baby of generation 6 born to deaf parents in 2014.
Other information
Documentation of Kata Kolok, a village sign language of Indonesia.
Acknowledgement and citation
To refer to any data from the collection, please cite as follows:
de Vos, Connie. 2013. Longitudinal Documentation of Sign Language Acquisition in a Deaf Village in Bali. Endangered Languages Archive. Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/2196/00-0000-0000-000F-84A7-1. Accessed on [insert date here].
