The Asian SignBank is an online database developed to facilitate sign language documentation, teaching, research and interpretation training. The database is initiated by the Asia-Pacific Sign Linguistics Research and Training Program (APSL) funded by the Nippon Foundation. Its aim is to document sign language data from countries in the Asia Pacific Region. Researchers under the APSL program have been contributing sign language data to the Asian SignBank.

There are two ways to look for lexical data on this website: searching by handshapes, and searching by glosses. For searching by glosses, you may enter the glosses in English, or in the corresponding written language of the country in which the sign language is used. For example, you may enter a gloss in Traditional Chinese to search for a sign in Hong Kong Sign Language, or a Japanese gloss for a sign in Japanese Sign Language.

After clicking a gloss, the signing video will be played on the screen. Basic information of the sign, e.g., which hand is the dominant hand, the number of hands involved, their phonetic features, the geographical region the sign belongs to, etc., will be listed on the right.

Users can export the linguistics features of the signs, e.g., their phonetic features such as hand movement, palm orientation, and the location of the signs, into an Excel table, which would facilitate data comparison on linguistics information across different sign languages for research purposes. There is another function of customized ordering of sign photos or line-drawings. Teaching materials and dictionaries can be produced and downloaded using this function.

If you are interested in knowing more about the online database and for any questions, please feel free to reach us via asiansignbank@cslds.org.