The video data used for the present analyses come mainly from the online dictionary of the Spread The Sign Project (Domfors and Fredäng, 2008) and also from LSD Visual Sign Language Dictionary (Hong Kong Sign Language: http://www.sign-aip.net/ sign-aip/en/home/index.php), Taiwan Sign Language Online Dictionary (Tsay et al.
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.