Dictionaries of African Sign Languages: An Overview

This article gives an overview of dictionaries of African sign languages that have been published to date most of which have not been widely distributed. After an introduction into the field of sign language lexicography and a discussion of some of the obstacles that authors of sign language dictionaries face in general, I will show problems related to sign language dictionary making in Africa in particular. In the main part of this article I show who produced these dictionaries, why and for whom they were produced, how data was collected, and I compare their content and their structures.