Long-term Project Corpus of German Sign Language

German Sign Language (DGS) has naturally developed over the centuries into a visual language with a comprehensive lexicon and a nuanced grammar. Sign Language is not international – DGS differs from other national sign languages and there is also regional variation (dialects) within DGS.

Goals

• Systematically capture and document DGS in all its living diversity

• Create an electronic dictionary based on the corpus data

Project Description

The dictionary is created to become an important reference work for everyone who uses DGS to communicate, both for DGS users in everyday life and also for DGS learners and linguists. In addition to the dictionary, the corpus will in the longer term also offer a variety of possibilities for researching numerous aspects of DGS: the DGS Corpus team is doing pioneering work in developing corpus-based methods for sign language research.

In the period from 2010 to 2012, 330 participants were filmed at twelve different locations in Germany. Around 560 hours of video are now being edited and analysed by a team of deaf and hearing researchers. The result is a growing annotated corpus. The videos contain a lot of interesting information from the life of deaf people and therefore they also have a high value as a cultural heritage.

The selection and description of the signs in the 6000 entries planned for the electronic dictionary are based primarily on this corpus. This means that all information about the signs can be confirmed through their use in context and the active involvement of the sign language community.

A representative sample of the videos, partly with annotation and metadata for research purposes, is already available online. Dictionary entries are also published successively in preliminary form.