DE VOS, Connie, 2014. ‘Absolute spatial deixis and proto-toponyms in Kata Kolok’. In Anthony JUKES, ed. Deixis and spatial expressions in languages of Indonesia. NUSA 56: 3-26. [Permanent URL: http://hdl.handle.net/?/?] Absolute spatial deixis and proto-toponyms in Kata Kolok Connie DE VOS Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics This paper presents an overview of spatial deictic structures in Kata Kolok, a sign language which is indigenous to a Balinese village community. Sociolinguistic surveys and lexicographic comparisons have indicated that Kata Kolok is unrelated to the signing varieties in other parts of Bali and should be considered a sign language isolate as such. Kata Kolok emerged five generations ago and has been in intimate contact with spoken Balinese from its incipience. The findings from this paper suggest that this cross-modal contact has led to an absolute construction of the signing space, which is radically different in comparison to spatial deixis in other sign languages. Furthermore, Kata Kolok does not seem to have a class of true toponyms, but rather deploys deictic proto-toponyms. The Kata Kolok system on the whole does not exhibit any related linguistic forms or direct calques from spoken Balinese, and this suggests that the conceptual overlap between these two languages may have been facilitated by shared cultural practices as well as gestural communication rather than direct borrowings. Ultimately, this analysis challenges the very notion of a sign language isolate and suggests that Kata Kolok and other emergent signing varieties should be considered in light of the broader semiotic context in which they have evolved. 1. Kata Kolok: a shared sign language Kata Kolok 1 is a sign language used by the deaf and hearing inhabitants of a farmers’ village in the north of Bali, in the region of Buleleng. The hearing villagers refer to Bengkala as Desa Kolok - which is Balinese for ‘deaf village’ – and its sign language as Kata Kolok ‘deaf talk’. The deafness in Bengkala is recessive, non-syndromal, and sensorineural and it is caused by a mutation of the gene referred to as DFNB3or MYO 15a (Friedman et al. 2000). The mutation that causes deafness is widespread throughout the village population, and as a result 2.2% of the villagers are congenitally deaf, but 17.6% of the hearing community members also carry the ‘deaf’ version of the gene (Winata et al. 1995). A reconstruction of the village’s lineages reveals that the first person to be affected by this gene was born seven generations ago (Liang et al. 1998). However, it was not until five generations ago that the language was used by a small group of deaf signers and it is this event that marks the emergence of Kata Kolok (de Vos 2012a). A sociolinguistic survey of the area, lexical comparisons, as well as 1 Sections of this paper have appeared in my PhD thesis (De Vos 2012a). This paper finds its origins in a tradition of research on frames of reference in co-speech gesture and sign language initiated by the Cognitive Anthropology Research Group, and later the Language & Cognition group at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. I would hereby like to thank my intellectual predecessors, in particular Stephen Levinson, Asifa Majid, John Haviland, Annie Senghas, Jenny Pyers, and Pamela Perniss. Thanks also go to the deaf and hearing community members of Bengkala (Bali) for their companionship and cooperation during the times that I visited their village. I would also like to express my gratitude to I Made Wira Dharma who produced the line drawings of signs based on snapshots stemming from video recordings. Abel Groenewolt designed the diagrams throughout this paper. This research was supported by the Max Planck Gesellschaft as well as the ERC Advanced Grant #269484 INTERACT awarded to Prof. Stephen C. Levinson.