Victoria Nyst, expert on African sign languages, joins the ASCL

Victoria Nyst, Associate Professor of Linguistics at the Leiden University Center for Linguistics (LUCL), has started working at the ASCL for one day a week. She is the initiator of the Leiden HANDS!Lab. At the ASCL, she will focus on African sign languages and their deaf users from a variety of perspectives, including historical, linguistic, and educational. In 2024 Dr Nyst was awarded a VICI grant to do research into the history of sign languages of deaf people. The historical linguistics of sign languages offer a fundamentally new perspective on the history of human languages. Nyst addresses the social and linguistic histories of sign languages in Europe and West Africa, using new historical data and newly collected contemporary data. 
 

'Now working at both the LUCL and the ASCL, I hope to strengthen the ties between these two institutes, and to jointly shed light on the role of languages and multilingualism in political, societal, economical, and historical dynamics on the continent', she says.

 

For more information about her VICI grant, read this interview. 

 

Watch her video: