Chapter 4. Linguistic study
Sign language studies began in the 2000s and the academic interest has been growing in linguistics, as well as other humanities and engineering areas. According to Engin Arık’s compilation of TİD studies, there are a few publications per year between 2000-2004 as journal articles, book chapters, proceedings, theses, dissertations, and conference presentations. With a steady increase through the years, there have been 12 to 15 scientific works per year between 2011-2013 on TİD. This chapter will give brief information about grammatical description (4.1), lexicographic work (4.2), and corpora (4.3). Finally, the current state of knowledge about sociolinguistic variation of TİD will be summarized in section 4.4.
Besides linguistic studies, there is a growing interest in computer science and engineering studies about Turkish Sign Language. There were 19 scientific studies by 2016 about automatic translation, education incorporating human-computer/robot interaction, and various other subjects. This line of research might open up new application possibilities of technology for society in the long-term (e.g. Aran, Santemiz, Arı, Kındıroğlu, & Akarun, 2016; Eryiğit, Köse, Kelepir, & Eryiğit, 2016; Köse, Uluer, & Akalın, 2016; Santemiz et al., 2009).