In August 2023 South African Sign Language (SASL) became the 12th language to be officially recognized in South Africa. This has drastically raised the profile of SASL and made it important in many institutions. It is crucial for an official language that the language be described as completely as possible. Thus far the greatest effort has gone into creating an on-line dictionary and great progress has been made here. The structure of SASL is, however, far less well described. The lack of such a descriptive grammar limits both academic understanding and practical application in education, policy, and community development.
This project aims to produce the first comprehensive, multimedia, and multilingual reference grammar of South African Sign Language (SASL), grounded in current linguistic research and presented on a dynamic digital platform. It will be a collaborative effort involving researchers and stakeholders across the country. It seeks to document the grammatical structures of SASL in a way that is accessible, updateable, and beneficial to researchers, educators, learners, students, policymakers and the South African Deaf community, while addressing a significant gap in both African and global sign language scholarship.