Welcome to Finnish Signbank!

Finnish Signbank is a lexical database of Finnish Sign Language (FinSL) and Finland-Swedish Sign Language (FinSSL). It is developed by the Corpus Project of Finland’s Sign Languages (CFINSL) at the Sign Language Centre of the University of Jyväskylä together with the corpus and dictionary work of the Finnish Association of the Deaf.

The basic purpose of Finnish Signbank is to serve as a tool in annotating FinSL and FinSSL texts. Linguistic annotations are attached to video time codes, and the coded material can be used to create a corpus of sign language texts.

In the corpus work of sign languages, each lexical sign (i.e. a sign which has an established form and meaning) is given a unique name, a gloss (e.g. TOIVOA or BERÄTTA). In addition to the gloss, Finnish Signbank contains the citation form of the sign on video, the sign’s Finnish or Swedish equivalents, and further information on the sign if necessary. The database will be supplemented as the annotation work progresses.

Parts of the FinSL lexicon have now been saved in the database, and preparations for lexicon work on FinSSL are being made at the Sign Language Centre. Two different FinSL lexicons are being created: the Kipo Corpus lexicon of the Finnish Association of the Deaf was opened to the public in June 2017, and in April 2018 the lexicon created by CFINSL. Using the corpus, you can check in the database to which sign each gloss refers. Both corpora (the Kipo Corpus and the Corpus FinSL of the Sign Language Centre) are available from the data of the of the Language Bank of Finland.

Finnish Signbank is based on the Signbank lexical databases of Australian Sign Language and Sign Language of the Netherlands. The source codes for all three databases are available at Github https://github.com/Signbank.

The videos saved in Finnish Signbank can be used in compliance with the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA licence https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/deed.en.