Introduction to the ATLAS Questionaire

This questionnaire is part of the sub-project ‘Atlas of Sign Language Structures’. The goal of this project is to create a world map that shows and compares the linguistic structures of the sign languages of the world.

Through four broadly distributed online questionnaires, we want to collect and elicit data from as many sign languages as possible, no matter whether they are well-investigated or less-investigated. We designed four different questionnaires dealing with different areas of grammar and socio-historical background:

(1) Questionnaire 1: Phonology and Lexicon

(2) Questionnaire 2: Morphology

(3) Questionnaire 3: Syntax

(4) Questionnaire 4: Pragmatics and Socio-historical Background

We ask one researcher to fill in only one questionnaire for his/her sign language of expertise. However, for some less-investigated sign languages, it is possible that one person will be asked to fill in more than one questionnaire for his/her sign language of expertise. A person, who fills in one or more questionnaires, will be called “content-provider”. Being a content-provider for a sign language can be considered as authorship for the respective questionnaire.

Based on these data, we will design an interactive online ATLAS of the world’s sign languages. With animated functional maps, we will show the grammatical structures of sign languages at the levels of phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, socio-history and pragmatics.
By participating in this online questionnaire, you contribute to the data collection of the world’s first online Atlas on sign language structures.