Rennellese Sign Language is the nearly extinct indigenous deaf sign language of Rennell Island

Rennell Island

Rennell Island, locally known as Mungava, is the main island of two inhabited islands that make up the Rennell and Bellona Province in the Solomon Islands. Rennell Island has a land area of that is about long and wide. It is the second largest raised coral atoll in the world with the largest lake...

, which has a high degree of congenital deafness. It was developed about 1915 by a deaf person named Kagobai, and was also used by hearing people in the community.

Classification

Wittmann (1991) posits that RSL is a language isolate (a 'prototype' sign language), though one developed through stimulus diffusion from an existing sign language.