Towards a Collaborative Agenda: Researching Variation in East African Sign Languages

Thanks to a BIEA Research Committee grant Professor Hannah Gibson, Dr Sam Lutalo-Kiingi, Dr Hope Morgan and Margaret Odhiambo met at Kyambogo University in Uganda for a week-long meeting dedicated to exploring issues in variation in East African sign languages.

The team (L-R): Hannah Gibson, Sam Lutalo-Kiingi, Hope Morgan, Margaret Odhiambo

The four members of the team first met in Kenya in 2024 during the World Congress on African Languages (WOCAL) conference at the University of Nairobi. There is a long-established dedicated African Sign Languages workshop which runs as part of the WOCAL conference series. Since then, they have been discussing ways to collaborate and work together on issues related to research on East African sign languages.

Uganda-based local host and collaborator Dr Sam Lutalo-Kiingi completed his PhD in 2014 with a thesis examining morphosyntactic features of Ugandan Sign Language. Dr Lutalo-Kiingi is now a Senior Lecturer and Head of Department at Kyambogo University. Dr Morgan and Margaret Odhiambo are working at the University of Hamburg on the ERC-funded project ‘SemaSign’ examining Kenyan Sign Language and German Sign Language. Professor Hannah Gibson’s research examines variation and multilingualism with a focus on languages of East Africa, including recent projects on dialectal variation in Swahili, language contact and multilingualism.

Bringing these strands of research together, the team used the meeting to start developing a project looking at a number of features in these three sign languages. The goal is to add to the descriptive status of all of these languages, and to better understand how these languages have emerged and continue to be shaped by the language ecologies in which they are found.

For example, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda all have in common the presence of the regional spoken lingua franca Swahili, as well as a central role played by English in formal contexts such as education. But the languages are distinct and are shaped by the local contexts in which they are used. Future projects could focus on language documentation and description, a comparison of mouthing patterns in the three languages, as well as the use and grammaticalisation of gesture across the East African region.

Ugandan Sign Language, Kenyan Sign Language and Tanzanian Sign Language are all under-documented and under-described. An examination of the similarities and differences between these languages, as well as a deeper understanding of these individual languages will add to our understanding of sign languages and linguistic variation in East Africa more broadly.

The week gave us an invaluable opportunity to share thoughts and ideas, drawing on our respective expertise and thinking about ways in which we could collaborate going forward.

The meeting also included a one-day community workshop with representatives from the Uganda National Association of the Deaf (UNAD) and a number of other local deaf led advocacy and community groups. The goal of the workshop was to get the views and perspectives of the participants on a number of possible research questions, as well as to better understand the priorities of community members for a research agenda.

We are very grateful to the BIEA for the support and for this opportunity to meet in Kampala!