Bangla Sign Language

The sign language used by the d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing community in Bangladesh. BdSL has distinct grammatical structures, vocabulary, and regional variation that differ from American Sign Language (ASL) and from the sign languages used in neighbouring countries. As a low-resource sign language, BdSL has limited standardised corpora (such as BDSL49), evolving vocabulary — especially for scientific and technical terms that often require fingerspelling or improvised gestures — and linguistic authority that rests substantially with teachers and local communities rather than centralised datasets. These characteristics make BdSL a critical case for research on culturally grounded, community-governed AI for Deaf education.