sign-lang@LREC Anthology

Documenting an Endangered Sign Language: Constructing a Corpus of Langue des Signes Malienne (CLaSiMa)

Nyst, Victoria


Volume:
Proceedings of the LREC2008 3rd Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Construction and Exploitation of Sign Language Corpora
Venue:
Marrakech, Morocco
Date:
1 June 2008
Pages:
145–149
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
License:
CC BY-NC
sign-lang ID:
08033

Content Categories

Projects:
Projet LaSiMa
Languages:
Malian Sign Language
Corpora:
CLaSiMa

Abstract

Langue des Signes Malienne (LaSiMa) is the local sign language of Mali. It evolved spontaneously in the streets of urban centers outside the context of Deaf education. The Malian ‘grins’, meeting places where men gather in the afternoon to chat and drink tea seem to be the cradle of this language.
Since about 15 years now, American Sign Language (ASL) has been introduced in Deaf education in Mali. As a consequence, LaSiMa has become the language of non-educated Deaf people and is by many considered to be inferior to ASL. LaSiMa is marginalized and at present, few Deaf adults in Bamako sign LaSiMa without mixing in some ASL signs. It is likely that in few generations, the use of LaSiMa will have reduced or altered greatly.
Little is known about sign languages from the African continent. In view of the evolution of LaSiMa outside the context of Deaf education in addition to its endangered status, a three-year documentation and description project was set up with the help of the Hans Rausing Endangered Language Program (URL). The aim of the project is to establish a corpus of LaSiMa discourse, a lexical database and descriptions of selected structural aspects of the language.
The Corpus Langue des Signes Malienne (CLaSiMa) aims at collecting a large, filmed sample of LaSiMa discourse. The sample is to be diverse and representative with respect to its signers (age, gender) and with respect to its discourse types. So far, 15 hours of discourse have been filmed. The filmed discourse is to be translated in French using ELAN software. A selection of the discourse in the corpus will be glossed. The material will be deposited in a digital archive, where it will be accessible through internet for the academic as well as the Malian Deaf community.
The initial approach to gather the data was inspired by the work on the NGT corpus (Crasborn & Zwitserlood, 2007). Their approach involved among others inviting pairs of signers to a filming location where they discuss preset issues and do specific language-based tasks. A similar approach in the LaSiMa context was challenged in several ways. Controlling the age and gender balance, the “nativeness” of signers was problematic as well as the cultural appropriateness of the material and the tasks, affecting the spontaneity of the signers. An alternative approach was developed, which involved recording one or two signers in their ‘grins’. This required training two native LaSiMa signers in film and interview techniques.
References
Onno Crasborn & Inge Zwitserlood (2007) 'The Corpus NGT project: challenges in publishing sign language data'. Workshop 'The emergence of corpus sign language linguistics', paper presented at BAAL 2007, Edinburgh, Thursday 6 Sept. 2007.

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@inproceedings{nyst:08033:sign-lang:lrec,
  author    = {Nyst, Victoria},
  title     = {Documenting an Endangered Sign Language: Constructing a Corpus of {Langue} des {Signes} {Malienne} ({CLaSiMa})},
  pages     = {145--149},
  editor    = {Crasborn, Onno and Efthimiou, Eleni and Hanke, Thomas and Thoutenhoofd, Ernst D. and Zwitserlood, Inge},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the {LREC2008} 3rd Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Construction and Exploitation of Sign Language Corpora},
  maintitle = {6th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2008)},
  publisher = {{European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}},
  address   = {Marrakech, Morocco},
  day       = {1},
  month     = jun,
  year      = {2008},
  language  = {english},
  url       = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/08033.pdf}
}
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