Abstract
This article is an introduction to a special corpus of Czech texts written by the Deaf - a unique project resulting from cooperation of two institutes of the Faculty of Arts at Charles University, Prague (the Institute of the Czech Language and Theory of Communication and the Czech National Corpus Institute). The two principal aims of the corpus DEAF are (1) to contribute to the improvement of teaching of the Czech language at schools for students with impaired hearing and (2) to provide a repository for records of the culture and history of the Czech Deaf.
The corpus, with a number of specific features reflecting the specificity of the language data, is also designed to provide the first firm basis for scientific analysis of written Czech used by the Deaf.