In Guinea-Bissau (GB), deaf people started meeting on a regular basis for the first time in 2004, in a school setting. The Sign Language (SL) of GB (Língua Gestual Guineense – LGG) has been emerging spontaneously in a fast-growing deaf community, based on an autochthonous vocabulary strongly influenced by the national culture with little, if any, influence of other languages, signed or oral. Being very recent, it enables the observation of the formation of a new SL in real time (Martins & Morgado 2008, 2016, 2017). The use of a repertoire of emblems is observed in most if not all cultures today. In GB, hearing people in social interactions with deaf people seem to use a particularly extensive set of emblems, i.e. conventional gestures with a fixed form and meaning. This happens naturally and consciously and appears to be the case in other parts of West Africa as well (Brookes and Nyst, 2014). It is also widely observed that such emblems are “absorbed” in SLs, as lexical items and/or grammatical markers (Loon, Pfau & Steinbach 2014). The first part of this study looked at the relation between emblems and their signed counterparts in a repertoire of about thirty emblems. Several types of emblem-to-sign relations were found, i.e. one-to-one relations, few-to-few relations, and many-to-many relations (Martins et al. 2019). Next we focus on the processes of lexicalisation and grammaticalisation that these emblems undergo in LGG. To systematise such processes, two deaf LGG instructors were asked to produce a smaller set of emblem-to-signs in different signed contexts. The results were then analysed regarding form, meaning, and function in order to identify lexical productivity and grammatical use. The linguistic strategies observed in LGG demonstrate what processes are active in the integration of gestures in an early stage of SL emergence. Keywords: West Africa, emblematic gestures, emerging sign language, Guinea-Bissau Sign Language Brookes, H. & Nyst, V. (2014). Gestures in the Sub-Saharan region. In C. Müller, E. Fricke, A. Cienki, D. McNeill & J. Bressem, (eds.), Body – Language – Communication: An international handbook on multimodality in human interaction, 2 (pp., 1154-1161). De Gruyter Mouton. Loon, E., Pfau, R. & Steinbach, M. (2014). The grammaticalization of gestures in sign languages. In C. Müller, E. Fricke, A. Cienki, D. McNeill & J. Bressem, (eds.), Body – Language – Communication: An international handbook on multimodality in human interaction, 2 (pp., 2133-2149). De Gruyter Mouton. Martins, M. & Morgado, M. (2008). Dicionário Escolar de Língua Gestual Guineense. Surd’Universo. Martins, M. & Morgado, M. (2017). Dicionário Prático de Língua Gestual Guineense. Surd’Universo. Martins, M. & Morgado, M. (2016). Deaf communities in Portuguese - speaking African countries. In B. G. García & L. B. Karnopp (orgs.) Change and promise: Bilingual deaf education and deaf culture in Latin America (pp. 136-154). Gallaudet University Press. Martins, M., Morgado, M. & Nyst, V. (2019). The contribution of emblematic gestures to the emerging sign language of Guinea-Bissau. Poster presented at TISLR 13, Hamburg.