Documentation and Analysis of West African Sign Languages

Documentation and Analysis of West African Sign Languages. NWO EuroBABEL-project (2009-2012). Project leader: Victoria Nyst.

Project data

Full title		Documentation and analysis of West-African sign languages
Duration		2009-2012
Nature		EuroBABEL (ESF EUROCORES Program)
Project leader		Victoria Nyst
Project members		Shane Gilchrist, BA (Research Assistant)
		Moustapha Magassouba (Malian team member)
		Aichata Diabaté (Malian team member)

Project description

Very little is known about the sign language situation in Africa and in West Africa in particular. In most countries, Deaf education came together with a foreign sign language. This has lead to diglossic situations in which Deaf communities, associating a low status to local sign languages, massively shift to the sign language of education. Local sign languages display considerable diversity in social setting, being used by home signers (isolated deaf individuals), by smaller and larger signing communities in urban centres or –as in the rare case of Adamorobe Sign Language (AdaSL)- by a community with a high incidence of hereditary deafness. As such, African sign languages, heavily understudied at present, provide an important opportunity to gain insights into the role of social setting in shaping natural sign languages.

As part of a larger effort to document and describe endangered West African sign languages, this project aims at creating a digital corpus of Adamorobe Sign Language (AdaSL) and sign language use in the Dogon Region, Mali. The theoretical focus of this project it to investigate to what extent sign language structure is influenced by features of its social setting. It will do so by comparing two West African sign languages; AdaSL and two varieties of Malian Sign Language: the Dogon variety and the Bamako variety.