This project aims at contributing to our knowledge about the use of sign language on the territory of Ukraine. To achieve this, we are building the corpus of the Ukrainian Sign Language by recording face-to-face conversations in Ukrainian Sign Language by Deaf Ukrainian refugees who left Ukraine after 2022 and came to Germany. The data collection as well as the data annotations are still ongoing. 

At the moment 6 dialogue conversations of 40-60 minutes were recorded at the University of Cologne in June-September 2022, in total ca. 3 hours of data. The participants were Deaf native signers who came from Kiev, Charkiw, Odessa and Brjansk. All pairs were well acquainted participants. The participants were allowed to talk about any topic they wanted. The conversations cover a range of topics (e.g. their life in Ukraine before and after the war; how they left Ukraine, their first experience in Germany, the Deaf lives in Ukraine and Germany). The language material was captured in optimal conditions using frontal view HD camera with green background. At the moment the corpus contains data from 7 participants (mean age 47 years old). 6 of them were born deaf, 1 signer was hard of hearing. The video recordings will be accompanied with ELAN transcriptions and annotations with a focus on discourse organization and conversational interaction and with particular attention to manual and nonmanual signals (such as head nods, head shake, eye gaze, eye blinks, mouth gesture, nose wrinkles, face expressions, eyebrow and lip movement).

Project outcome

• Bauer, Anastasia & Roman Poryadin. 2023. Our stories – Experiences of Ukrainian Deaf people leaving Ukraine in 2022 and coming to Germany. Conversations in Ukrainian Sign Language. Data Center for the Humanities. https://doi.org/ 10.18716/dch/a.00000015.