About
Welcome to the Corpus of Israeli Sign Language!
The Aims of the Project
- To create an ISL “corpus“: a collection, on the internet, of video clips showing deaf people using ISL, together with background information about the signers and written descriptions of the signing.
- To carry out research into ISL grammar and vocabulary, variation in ISL across the country and how ISL is changing.
What is variation?
ISL is rich with variation. Not every deaf person signs in exactly the same way. For example, deaf people in Tel Aviv sign ‘chocolate’ differently from deaf people in Haifa. Older deaf people sign ‘television’ differently from younger deaf people. One of the aims of this corpus is to research these differences – how ISL varies across groups of signers and how the language is changing over time. In order to do this, we filmed deaf people from all over Israel and from all sorts of different backgrounds – old, young, male, female, Ashkenazi, Morrocan, Jewish, Arab, etc. We filmed deaf people signing freely – in conversations, telling stories, answering questions – as well as showing their signs for pictures.
Is the Corpus of ISL the only one? There are many sign language corpora around the world in different countries such as the UK, the Netherlands, Japan, Germany, Spain, Hong Kong, Australia…and more. Another aim of the corpus is to compare the findings from the Corpus of ISL to sign language corpora in other countries – sign languages which differ in terms of their size or age. The findings can tell us how factors like community size and age might influence the amount of variation in a sign language. ISL is a particularly young sign language, estimated to be only 90 years old, while other sign languages around the world are older, like British Sign Language, which is around 250-300 years old.
What do we do
after we film the Corpus?
We spend a lot of time coding the data with relevant information about the signs – their meaning, their handshapes, their use – and information about the signer’s background – their age, the city they live in, gender – but no personal information.
The ISL Corpus is openly accessible to anyone with a computer and access to the internet. ISL is a natural language, which changes over time and so it is important that we document the language and how it changes. Having the corpus online will allow for a greater exchange of ideas and information between sign language researchers in universities and the deaf community. We hope that the corpus will be used by teachers, interpreters, parents of deaf children, students of ISL and deaf community members.
