Sign language corpora designed for sociolinguistic research: A critical review

Sign language corpora are generally under-represented in the field of corpus linguistics. Fortunately, in the last twenty years there has been a steady rise in their creation, following technological advancements in video capture, transcription, and coding. This article presents one of the first systematic reviews of the current state of sign language corpora around the world, with a special focus on monolingual corpora whose main aim is to conduct sociolinguistic investigations. Furthermore, it discusses the challenges faced by sign language linguists in creating visual corpora that are representative and authentic, machine-readable and searchable, and openly available. Forty-nine sign language corpora are described, serving as a fundamental starting point for assessing the field and its continual development.