Garage Museum of Contemporary Art will host the first public linguistic laboratory. It will be devoted to issues dealing with the variability of signs and dialects in Russian Sign Language.
Earlier this year, Garage’s Inclusive Programs department initiated an all-Russian data collection in Russian Sign Language (RSL), aimed at studying the deaf community’s regional and local signs. The obtained data was initially processed by a working group of linguists and experts on RSL.
The three-day laboratory will allow participants to discuss RSL’s individual signs as well as general patterns and might become a starting platform for researchers looking for answers to questions concerning the existence of dialects.