Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on a new emerging identity of "Langue des Signes d'Afrique Francophone (LSAF)" as a result of the legacy of the Deaf education and the new movements by Deaf community in West and Central Africa with the results based on a long-term fieldwork in the sign language community.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on a new emerging identity of "Langue des Signes d'Afrique Francophone (LSAF, French-speaking African Sign Language)" as a result of the legacy of the Deaf education and the new movements by Deaf community in West and Central Africa with the results based on a long-term fieldwork in the sign language community.

In this area, the education for the Deaf has started since 1957 by Andrew J. Foster, a Deaf African-American pastor/educator. It introduced American Sign Language (ASL) for the first time in Africa. After the process of the pidginization and the creolization with spoken/written French, ASL introduced in Africa became a new sign language with loan words of ASL and grammatical characters of French.

This sign language has been considered as one of the various dialects of ASL in the world. Through a long-term fieldwork that started in 1997 and the discussions among the Deaf community, this sign language recently started to be considered as a newly constructed independent sign language that differs from ASL.

The field data and the products of several dictionaries of this sign language edited by Deaf Africans support the recognition that the name of this sign language is now changing and the identity of the African Deaf community is also shifting.

Some examples will be shown with the cases in several countries. Also the controversies between the Pan-Africanism and the nationalism among the Deaf community will be discussed.