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Jón Guðnason
Dispatch

Endangered languages in Paris: data collection for Icelandic Sign Language

At the 30th conference of the Foundation for Endangered Languages in Paris, Rannveig Sverrisdóttir and Guðný Björk Þorvaldsdóttir presented our work on collecting data for Icelandic Sign Language.

Rannveig Sverrisdóttir, on the left, speaking and gesturing with both hands at a panel table, with the session chair Salem Mezhoud in the centre and Guðný Björk Þorvaldsdóttir on the right. Above them a projected slide headed 'Data Collection Settings and Types of Data' lists good visual quality filmed in a studio setting, five camera angles, a pair of signers with a Deaf moderator and instructions given in Icelandic Sign Language, and sessions of two to three hours. Photographs from the studio show camera rigs around a green screen and pairs of signers in conversation, and the logos of the Communication Centre for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, the University of Iceland and Reykjavík University sit in the lower corner.
Rannveig Sverrisdóttir and Guðný Björk Þorvaldsdóttir presenting our work, with the session chair Salem Mezhoud between them, at the 30th Conference of the Foundation for Endangered Languages, Paris, 3 November 2026.

The opening address

This week I am attending the 30th Annual Conference of the Foundation for Endangered Languages in Paris, hosted by the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilisations. The conference co-chairs, Hakim Elnazarov of the Foundation and Abdul Hakim Hamidi of the Institute, gave the opening address, and one passage from Abdul Hakim Hamidi’s part has stayed with me:

Language is far more than a system of communication. It embodies collective memory, cultural knowledge, social relationships, identities and distinctive ways of understanding the world. When a language disappears, we risk losing not only its words, grammatical structures and expressions, but also the unique forms of knowledge, cultural practices and intergenerational connections it carries.

The first day brought talks on languages from all over the world that are struggling in one way or another, and on the many ways linguists, technologists and the communities themselves are working to support and revitalise them.

Our talk

On 3 November, Rannveig Sverrisdóttir and Guðný Björk Þorvaldsdóttir presented our paper, Combining a Linguistic Corpus and Language Technology (development). Data collection for Icelandic Sign Language, written with me and Torfi Þórhallsson. They covered the background of the language, the outline of our research project and how the data collection and annotation work has begun.

Icelandic Sign Language has fewer than 300 signers and is threatened. A government committee on the language warned in 2015 that it was endangered, as fluent native signers are becoming fewer.

In our project, Sign and Talk, which I presented at QUT in August, we are gathering parallel video, audio and text so that neural models can be trained to translate between signing, speech and text.

What the attention itself does

The technology the language needs will, in time, support communication within the deaf community and between deaf and hearing people. A less obvious result, and one that arrives sooner, is set out in our abstract:

A project of this kind directs sustained attention and resources at a small community, and this attention carries its own message, that the language is worth the effort. For a community whose language has long been treated as marginal, that recognition matters, and it strengthens the confidence on which any revitalisation ultimately depends.

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