4.2. Lexicographic work
During the 1980s, a first inventory of the signs used in the Netherlands was compiled. This was done in the light of the KOMVA project (1982-1990, see also Section 3.2) and resulted in the description of 15,000 signs. Currently, most of the lexicographic work is conducted at the Dutch Sign Centre, which developed theme-centered dvd-roms and books. On the dvd-roms, clips of signs are provided, sometimes with example sentences. The books feature drawings with symbols to account for movement. Furthermore, the Dutch Sign Centre developed and hosts a large online NGT dictionary, of which a small part is freely available (Schermer et al. 2020).Based on this, a print dictionary with over 3,000 lexemes was published in 2009 in cooperation with Van Dale, a large national publisher of dictionaries in print form (Schermer & Koolhof eds. 2009). In April 2020, the Dutch Sign Centre had 20,000 concepts (in the form of glosses) in their database. See Appendix 1 for a complete list of dictionaries of NGT.
The research group in Nijmegen is also working on an online database with data extracted from the Corpus NGT (see next section). In this database, called NGT Signbank, most datapoints include a video and/or photo of the sign, a phonological description, sociolinguistic information on its users, and possible translations in Dutch and English.