The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 introduces some basic principles of lexicostatistics applied to SL, Section 3 describes the web application we created for phonological annotation of signs, Section 4 describes the comparative approach applied to the data, Section 5 reports the results of a case study on four Asian SLs, and Section 6 provides the analysis of handshapes of the sample of 23 SLs.
previous research has not attempted a systematic comparison of a large sample of SLs.