The Act CXXV of 2009 on Hungarian Sign Language and the Use of Hungarian Sign Language recognizes Hungarian Sign Language (HSL) as an independent natural language, moreover it provides the legal framework to introduce bilingual education (HSL-Hungarian) in 2017. In order to establish the linguistic background for bilingual education it was crucial to carry out linguistic research on HSL, which research should be sociolinguistically underpinned and should include corpus-based research. This research also aims to standardize HSL for educational purposes with the highest possible degree of community engagement. During the SIGNificant Chance project a sign language corpus (approximately 1750 hours) was created. A nation-wide fieldwork was conducted (five regions, nine venues). 147 sociolinguistic interviews and 27 grammatical tests (with 54 participants) were recorded in multiple-camera settings. There were also Hungarian competency tests and narrative interviews conducted with selected participants in order to make the complex description of their different linguistic practices in different discursive contexts possible. We are using ELAN and three different templates to analyze the collected data for different purposes (sociolinguistic-grammatical template, another for short term project purposes, and one for the dictionary). Some parts of the annotation work has been finished which contributed to the writing of the basic grammar of HSL and the creation of a small corpus-based dictionary of HSL.
@inproceedings{bartha:16021:sign-lang:lrec,
author = {Bartha, Csilla and Holecz, Margit and Varjasi, Szabolcs},
title = {The {SIGNificant} {Chance} Project and the Building of the First {Hungarian} {Sign} {Language} Corpus},
pages = {1--6},
editor = {Efthimiou, Eleni and Fotinea, Stavroula-Evita and Hanke, Thomas and Hochgesang, Julie A. and Kristoffersen, Jette and Mesch, Johanna},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the {LREC2016} 7th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Corpus Mining},
maintitle = {10th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2016)},
publisher = {{European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}},
address = {Portoro{\v z}, Slovenia},
day = {28},
month = may,
year = {2016},
language = {english},
url = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/16021.pdf}
}