• Belfast
• Birmingham
• Bristol
• Cardiff
• Glasgow
• London
• Manchester
• Newcastle

This page documents the variation found within the signs for UK place names from the “What’s your sign?” task from the BSL Corpus in which 249 Deaf BSL signers (30 each in Belfast, Birmingham, Cardiff, Glasgow, Manchester & Newcastle, 32 in Bristol & 37 in London) were asked their signs for various concepts. Next to each city name under Sign Distribution, we show the number of people in each city who gave that sign as their preferred sign for that place name. Blue dots on the map indicate cities where that variant is reported to be in use. There are no orange dots on these pages because we do not yet have information about traditional variants of these place names. Because we only asked approximately 30 people in each region what sign they preferred to use for a specific concept, all the variants that are actually in use within each region may not have been recorded. A few of the 249 responses have been excluded (and thus frequencies don’t always add up to 249) because they were produced by a small number of signers and need to be verified.

Is your UK place name sign missing? Tell us about it!