Sign Language: The State of the Art in Italian Universities Fourteen Years On

In 2001 Laura Gran and I contributed to the Hymes and Cortese issue of Textus with an article about a particular code and mode of human communication: language as something signed and in particular, sign language interpreting and its entry into Italian academia. Laura Gran renowned for her research on neurolinguistics related to spoken language Interpreting Studies, encouraged me to help her introduce sign language interpreting courses at the former Advanced School of Modern Languages for Interpreters and Translators at the University of Trieste in 1998. Because Laura was near retirement she declined an offer from Giuseppina Cortese to join a National Research Project unit at the University of Turin in which Sign Language (SL) was to play a part. I ended up joining the unit instead, taking the radical decision to change the direction of my research and thanks to Giuseppina have since discovered the world of SL “languaging”. Therefore,fifteen years on, it is highly fitting to return to that article and reflect upon how my working with Giuseppina Cortese’s unit led her to indirectly influence some of the research in SL related studies in Italy.