Thursday, August 29, 2013

Polish Sign Language

It's the largest collection of info on Polish sign language in the world. That's what the University of Warsaw says about its three year old effort. The Corpus research by the Section for Sign Linguistics will eventually be used to creat the first Polish sign language dictionary and a description of the language's grammar. Some 80 deaf signers from all over the country have already contributed more than 300 hours of recordings made with five cameras in a studio. One of the researchers tells the Polish Press Agency's Science and Scholarship in Poland site, "The corpus is a treasure trove of knowledge not only about the grammar of sign language, but also about the culture of the deaf. While collecting the linguistic data, we also collect information about the life of the deaf in early twenty-first century Poland. We often forget that the deaf are one of the largest linguistic minorities in Poland, with their own traditions, culture, poetry, theatre, civility, etc." Here's a sample of what the recordings look like.