Desa Kolok – literally “deaf village” – in the north of Bali has
a community with a unique sociolinguistic setting. The presence
of genetic deafness over many generations has given rise to an
indigenous sign language and socio-cultural adaptations to
deafness. The village community in Desa Kolok has adapted to the
presence of deafness to an extent not known in any other
community. Deaf members of the village have special social roles
such as waterpipe management, burials, and policing of the
village, and there are specific cultural and social practices
referring to deafness, including a deaf god in the local variety
of Hinduism and myths about the origin of deafness in the
village. The author also documents the linguistic structures of
the village sign language Kata Kolok (“deaf language”) in
detail. Kata Kolok differs from most other known sign languages
with respect to the use of the sign space in its linguistic
system: the sign space is not used metaphorically to refer to
non-spatial concepts such as time,