Az alábbiakban a HunSIGN – Hungarian Sign Language Research Forum 2026 meghívott előadóinak bemutatkozása és előadásaik angol nyelvű absztraktja olvasható.
Jelmagyarázat: Magyar hangzó nyelv Magyar jelnyelv Angol hangzó nyelv Nemzetközi jelnyelv
Az angol nyelvű absztraktokhoz magyar jelnyelvi videóváltozat is készült. A videókban közvetített szövegek nem az angol absztraktok hivatalos fordításai, és tartalmuk eltérhet az eredeti szövegektől.
Carl Börstell (in person)
University of Bergen, Norway
Carl “Calle” Börstell is a hearing linguist from Sweden, currently working as a professor at the University of Bergen, Norway. With an educational background from Stockholm University, his academic background was shaped in parallel by linguistic typology and sign linguistics. His own academic path eventually led him to doing, among other things, quantitative research informed by corpus linguistics, experimental work on iconicity and more recently explorations of kinematics using computer vision.
The question of data has changed dramatically in linguistics over the last 50 years, and perhaps even more so for sign language linguistics specifically. Moving from none or limited, and sometimes questionable data, we now have better access to larger datasets for many sign languages following numerous corpus projects. But what type(s) of data do we want? In my presentation, I will outline my own experiences as a hearing linguist navigating sign language linguistics. Initially, my focus will be on the data I have myself collected, contributed to or used throughout my academic progression, highlighting both methodological and ethical aspects. Moving to the present day, I will illustrate some of the possibilities for linguistic analysis of quite basic corpus data. What can we do with the data we already have? The question that follows is what type of data is missing still. Is there something that would be useful for further advancement of linguistic research, as well as for language documentation?
Hajnalka Csernyák (in person)
ELTE Nyelvtudományi Kutatóközpont, Magyarország
Theodorus Du Plessis (in person)
University of the Free State, South Africa
Prof. Theo du Plessis is professor in language management at the Department of South African Sign Language, University of the Free State, South Africa. He published 4 monographs, 78 book chapters, 11 papers in conference proceedings, 60 articles in accredited journals and co-edited 15 book volumes. His most recent Afrikaans monograph (available in XML) covers the history of the officialization of South African Sign Language. He is editor-in-chief of two book series with local academic publishers and council member of the Afrikaans language academy.
This paper examines the institutionalisation trajectory of South African Sign Language (SASL), tracing its remarkable evolution into the country’s twelfth official language in tandem with legal interventions between 1994 and 2026. Drawing on language policy and planning (LPP), the presentation addresses the dynamic interplay between bottom-up community activism and top-down legislative processes. Grounded in a longitudinal historical-sociolinguistic approach and framed by the tripartite model of status, corpus, and acquisition planning, the paper evaluates how an increasingly established position was secured for the language across key official language domains – legislation, the judiciary, public administratoin and education. Finally, the paper reflects on future language management challenges, arguing that sustainable institutionalisation requires shifting from symbolic status toward functional implementation and emphasising the crucial role of ongoing research.
Herbszt-Romanek Péter Zalán (in person)
Estonian Sign Language Research Lab, Tallinn University, Estonia
Péter Zalán Herbszt-Romanek is the lab coordinator of the Estonian Sign Language Research Lab at Tallinn University, Estonia. Having originally studied classical philology, he now works in the field of Sign Language Studies, focusing on language resources, language documentation, and language policy and planning. His research experience also includes the JelEsély and NyelvEsély projects, and much of his current work is done with colleagues across Europe and in Brazil, developing resources that strengthen both research and community capacity. He also teaches in various sign language interpreter training programs in Austria, Germany, and Hungary.
Following the 2009 legal recognition of Hungarian Sign Language (MJNY), Research Centre for Multilingualism (TTK) projects established foundations for its documentation, description, and educational use. JelEsély, NyelvEsély, and related projects produced video collections, ELAN annotations, a digital dictionary, a preliminary grammar, terminology, and educational materials (Bartha & Hattyár, 2025; Bartha et al., 2015, 2016). JelEsély recorded approximately 1,750 hours of video and involved over 400 Deaf participants, including 25 Deaf research partners (Bartha & Hattyár, 2025). These resources remain distributed across platforms, formats, annotation stages, and access conditions. The presentation asks: How can existing MJNY resources be reorganized as an interoperable, sustainable infrastructure while ensuring Deaf authority over access, reuse, validation, and technological development? It proposes integrating them into a Deaf-governed ecosystem using VisuoLab and Signbank 2.0 for MJNY (Quadros et al., 2024; Rathmann et al., 2024). The framework draws on participatory community-based language research, in which knowledge is constructed for, with, and by community members through sustained relationships and shared responsibility (Czaykowska-Higgins, 2009, 2018; Czaykowska-Higgins et al., 2018). Resources are evaluated according to traceability, revisability, interoperability, accessibility, and governability. FAIR addresses findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reuse (Wilkinson et al., 2016), whereas CARE foregrounds collective benefit, authority to control, responsibility, and ethics (Carroll et al., 2020). Although CARE originated in Indigenous data governance, this proposal neither equates Indigenous and Deaf communities nor transfers CARE uncritically; it adapts the principles to the Hungarian Deaf community’s circumstances. The framework includes a formally constituted, majority-Deaf governance board with binding authority over access, consent, reuse, validation, research priorities, and technological development. Deaf research partners would serve as compensated decision-makers, resource curators, and co-developers throughout the infrastructure’s lifecycle. The proposal reframes the TTK legacy as the foundation for a revisable, interoperable, and Deaf-governed infrastructure supporting research, education, language planning, and technological development in Hungary.
Keywords: Hungarian Sign Language; community-based language research; Deaf governance; language-resource infrastructure; FAIR and CARE
Selected references
Bartha, C., & Hattyár, H. (2025). A nyelvnélküliségtől a közös tudáskonstruálásig: A siketség és a jelnyelvek magyarországi diskurzusainak vázlata. In G. Tolcsvai Nagy (Ed.), Az élő Akadémia kétszáz éve: A nyelvtudomány és az MTA (pp. 599–661).
Bartha, C., Romanek, P. Z., Hámori, Á., Nagyné Kiss, A., Szabó, M. H., Csernyák, H., Pásztor, D., & Tarr, Z. (Eds.). (2015). A Magyar Jelnyelv Szótára. http://jelesely.hu/szotar/?dictionary
Bartha, C., Holecz, M., & Varjasi, S. (2016). The SIGNificant Chance project and the building of the first Hungarian Sign Language corpus. In E. Efthimiou, S.-E. Fotinea, T. Hanke, J. A. Hochgesang, J. Kristoffersen, & J. Mesch (Eds.), Proceedings of the LREC2016 7th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Corpus Mining (pp. 1–6). European Language Resources Association. https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/16021.html
Carroll, S. R., Garba, I., Figueroa-Rodríguez, O. L., Holbrook, J., Lovett, R., Materechera, S., Parsons, M., Raseroka, K., Rodríguez-Lonebear, D., Rowe, R., Sara, R., Walker, J. D., Anderson, J., & Hudson, M. (2020). The CARE principles for Indigenous data governance. Data Science Journal, 19, Article 43. https://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2020-043
Czaykowska-Higgins, E. (2009). Research models, community engagement, and linguistic fieldwork: Reflections on working within Canadian Indigenous communities. Language Documentation & Conservation, 3(1), 15–50. http://hdl.handle.net/10125/4423
Czaykowska-Higgins, E. (2018). Reflections on ethics: Re-humanizing linguistics, building relationships across difference. In B. McDonnell, A. L. Berez-Kroeker, & G. Holton (Eds.), Reflections on language documentation 20 years after Himmelmann 1998 (pp. 110–121). University of Hawai‘i Press. http://hdl.handle.net/10125/24813
Czaykowska-Higgins, E., Daniels, X. D., Kulchyski, T., Paul, A., Thom, B., Twance, S. M., & Urbanczyk, S. C. (2018). Consultation, relationship and results in community-based language research. In S. Bischoff & C. Jany (Eds.), Insights from practices in community-based research: From theory to practice around the globe (pp. 66–93). De Gruyter Mouton. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110527018-004
de Quadros, R. M., Rathmann, C., Romanek, P. Z., Fernandes, F., & Condé, S. (2024). Signbank 2.0 of sign languages: Easy to administer, easy to use, easy to share. In E. Efthimiou, S.-E. Fotinea, T. Hanke, J. A. Hochgesang, J. Mesch, & M. Schulder (Eds.), Proceedings of the LREC-COLING 2024 11th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Evaluation of Sign Language Resources (pp. 302–314). ELRA and ICCL. https://aclanthology.org/2024.signlang-1.34/
Rathmann, C., de Quadros, R. M., Geißler, T., Peters, C., Fernandes, F., Loio, M. P., & França, D. (2024). VisuoLab: Building a sign language multilingual, multimodal and multifunctional platform. In E. Efthimiou, S.-E. Fotinea, T. Hanke, J. A. Hochgesang, J. Mesch, & M. Schulder (Eds.), Proceedings of the LREC-COLING 2024 11th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Evaluation of Sign Language Resources (pp. 282–289). ELRA and ICCL. https://aclanthology.org/2024.signlang-1.32/
Rathmann, C., Müller de Quadros, R., & Barbosa da Silva, J. (2025). Exploring ethical discussion in sign language research. Sign Language Studies, 26(1), 169–211. https://doi.org/10.1353/sls.2025.a981202
Wilkinson, M. D., Dumontier, M., Aalbersberg, I. J. J., Appleton, G., Axton, M., Baak, A., Blomberg, N., Boiten, J.-W., da Silva Santos, L. B., Bourne, P. E., Bouwman, J., Brookes, A. J., Clark, T., Crosas, C., Dillo, I., Dumon, O., Edmunds, S., Evelo, C. T., Finkers, R., … Mons, B. (2016). The FAIR guiding principles for scientific data management and stewardship. Scientific Data, 3, Article 160018. https://doi.org/10.1038/sdata.2016.18
Herbszt-Romanek Péter Zalán előadásának magyar jelnyelvi videóváltozata
(photo: Outi Pippuri)
Tommi Jantunen (in person)
University of Jyväskylä, Finland
Tommi Jantunen is Professor of Finnish Sign Language at the Sign Language Centre, Department of Language and Communication Studies, University of Jyväskylä. His research has focused on identifying and analyzing patterns and variation in the structure and use of signed languages. In this work, he has extensively employed state-of-the-art data and research technologies, including signed language corpora, motion capture, and brain imaging methods. In recent years, Jantunen has directed his research particularly toward questions that explore the boundaries of language as a phenomenon, as well as toward documenting the emergence and development of Finnish Sign Language as a university-based field of research and education.
The academic discipline of Finnish Sign Language has emerged over a period of forty years within the historically contested landscape of general and applied linguistics (Rissanen & al. 2024; Jantunen 2025). Research began within a general linguistics framework at the University of Helsinki in the early 1980s and gradually became established within the applied linguistics context of the University of Jyväskylä by 2010. In that year, the University of Jyväskylä was granted a nationally designated responsibility, together with dedicated funding, for research and highest-level education in signed languages. Today, this mandate is carried out by the university’s Sign Language Centre.
Navigating disciplinary boundaries within linguistics, particularly the distinction between general and applied linguistic research, has been only one factor shaping the development of Finnish Sign Language as an academic subject. Another important factor has been advocacy of a political nature, which has emphasized the immediate societal applicability of research and, at times, has also influenced the selection of research topics. Developing into an established academic actor from these starting points has required strategic choices and positioning. Some of these choices have proven successful, while others have been less effective. Periodic crises have also been part of the field’s development.
In this presentation, I provide an overview of the emergence of Finnish Sign Language as an academic discipline and discuss key milestones in its development in Finland. I then reflect on the strategic decisions that have shaped and still shape the field and examine how these choices have contributed, successfully or unsuccessfully, to the development and institutionalization of Finnish Sign Language research and higher education within the ever-changing academic landscape.
References
Jantunen, Tommi (2025). Yliopistollisen viittomakielialan kehkeytyminen ja identiteetin etsintä Suomessa [The development of sign language research at university level and its identity formation in Finland]. In Hannele Dufva, Anna Mauranen & Katja Mäntylä (eds.), 50 vuotta soveltavaa kielitiedettä: Näkökulmia AFinLA ry:n toimintaan (pp. 221–244). Suomen soveltavan kielitieteen yhdistys ry. https://doi.org/10.30660/afinla.160608
Rissanen, Terhi, Rainò, Päivi & Takkinen, Ritva (2024). Early Research on Finnish Sign Language: In the Footsteps of Great Role Models. Sign Language Studies, 24(2), 362–375. https://doi.org/10.1353/sls.2024.a920116
Vadim Kimmelman (online)
University of Bergen, Norway
Vadim Kimmelman is a professor of linguistics at the University of Bergen, Norway. He has a PhD in linguistics from University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands (2014). He has conducted research on a wide variety of topics within sign language linguistics, including information structure, argument structure, quotation, lexical variation, syntax and semantics of classifier predicates, and automatic processing of sign language data. His ongoing project NONMANUAL investigates the phonetic side of nonmanual markers across sign languages using computer vision tools.
Studying sign languages as a linguist is exciting and insightful: understanding how sign languages work is necessary if we want to understand how language works in general, and how diverse languages can be. But our answers to these exciting and interesting questions rely on the quality of the data and methodological tools that we have, and this is also true for sign language linguistics. In my research experience in the past 20 years, I have always been interested in figuring out what methods work well enough to deliver reliable and relevant data, and I have tried out many different methods. In my presentation, I will focus on three methodological approaches: (pseudo)-experimental production and judgment tasks, corpus linguistics, and automatic processing of video data with computer vision. I will discuss advantages and shortcomings of these methods, also specifically for sign languages, and share some thoughts on how to achieve better methodological robustness in future.
Christian Rathmann (online)
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany
Estonian Sign Language Research Lab, Tallinn University, Estonia
The presentation will address how linguistic description and research infrastructures can be connected to the development of sustainable resources for language planning. I would particularly like to consider how experiences and resources developed within European initiatives such as ProSign and DeafSign can inform language teaching and learning, interpreter education and assessment, and how such approaches might be relevant to the further development of Hungarian Sign Language research.
Christian Rathmann előadásának magyar jelnyelvi videóváltozata
Markus Steinbach (in person)
University of Göttingen, Germany
Markus Steinbach is a professor at the University of Göttingen. He has worked on the impact of modality on language in the fields of morphosyntax, semantics and pragmatics. His work on sign languages includes various kinds of collaborative studies using different experimental methods and covers a variety of topics such as agreement, grammaticalization, anaphora resolution and role shift. In recent studies, he focuses on the interaction of gesture and sign languages and develops formal models that account for the impact of gestural depictions on the form and meaning of sign languages. An important aspect of his research is participation of the linguistic communities that are involved in the studies.
Clark and Gerrig (1990) observed that interlocutors draw on three fundamentally different communicative devices: “When people communicate, they […] can describe. They can indicate, or point. And they can demonstrate.” Linguistic communication is thus not purely descriptive. Interlocutors also make use of two depictive devices: pointing and demonstrating. Across speech, sign, and writing, humans therefore communicate not only by means of arbitrary symbols, but also through imagistic forms that resemble, enact, or vividly present aspects of what they mean. Strikingly, however, there is still no linguistic theory that can model depictive meaning components and their systematic interaction with descriptive meaning in a principled and comprehensive way. This is not a peripheral omission; it is a major theoretical gap. Depictive devices of the affecto-imagistic dimension were ignored or neglected in many linguistic theories until quite recently. In this presentation, I focus on so-called mixed items such as classifiers, idiomatic signs and iconic signs (among others), which are an interesting example of the interaction of depictive and descriptive meaning components. I argue for the need of a new unified linguistic theory of the complex interaction between descriptive and depictive meaning at different levels of the linguistic system, i.e. it is about time that we open what has been called the black box of depiction and iconicity (Schlenker, Lamberton & Kuhn 2024; Ebert et al. 2026).