New Guinea and Pacific Sign Languages

Sign languages are natural languages that arise independently among deaf communities and are not genetically related to the spoken languages of the hearing populations that surround them, so a national or regional sign language of the Pacific and maritime Southeast Asia is filed here by its own documented lineage rather than by the spoken languages of the country where it is used. This group holds every New Guinea and Pacific Language Families member whose sourced description identifies it as a sign language, including the Philippine, Indonesian and other national sign languages reported in this subcategory, collecting them into one place rather than leaving them scattered under whichever geographic label their entry happened to carry, the same convention this atlas's Eurasian Language Families subcategory already uses for its own sign languages.