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 timeframe 2010 to 2012, 330 Deaf people were filmed at twelve different locations all over Germany. Approximately 350 hours of video are now being analysed by a team of Deaf and hearing researchers. 

The result is a growing annotated corpus. This material contains many interesting anecdotes from Deaf life in Germany. This means that the corpus has a substantial value for cultural heritage as well. In 2024 to 2025, further data will be collected with Deaf people aged 18 to 32 years to document the recent language change observable in DGS.

The selection and description of entries of the electronic dictionary is primarily based on this corpus which allows all signs to be viewed in context.

A representative sample of the videos, with annotation as well as metadata for research purposes, is already available online. 

Dictionary entries of the Digital Dictionary of DGS (DW-DGS) have been published successively in a preliminary form since 2018.