Auslan
Encyclopedia
Auslan is the sign language
of the Australia
n deaf community. The term Auslan is an acronym of "Australian sign language", coined by Trevor Johnston in the early 1980s, although the language
itself is much older. Auslan is related to British Sign Language
(BSL) and Scottish Sign Language (SSL); the three have descended from the same parent language
, and together comprise the BASSL Language Family. Auslan has also been influenced by Irish Sign Language
(ISL) and more recently has borrowed signs from American Sign Language
(ASL).
As with other sign languages, Auslan's grammar
and vocabulary
is quite distinct from English
. Its invention cannot be attributed to any individual; rather, it is a natural language
that developed organically over time.
The number of people for whom Auslan is their primary or preferred language is difficult to determine. Recent studies have put the figure at 6500, a much lower figure than was previously thought, though a 2006 census showed 7150 used the language. The number may be diminishing, and although Auslan's status and recognition is growing, there is some speculation that it is an endangered language
. Of those who use Auslan as their main language, only about 5% learned it from their parents, with the rest acquiring it from peers at school or later in life.
The emerging status of Auslan has gone hand-in-hand with the advancement of the deaf community in Australia, beginning in the early 1980s. In 1982, the registration of the first sign language interpreters by NAATI, a newly established regulatory body for interpreting and translating, accorded a sense of legitimacy to Auslan, furthered by the publishing of the first dictionary
of Auslan in 1989. Auslan began to emerge as a language of instruction for deaf students in secondary schools in the 1990s — mainly through the provision of interpreters in mainstream (hearing) schools with deaf support units. Boosted by the 1992 enactment of the federal Disability Discrimination Act, sign language interpreters are also increasingly provided in tertiary education.
Today there is a growing number of courses teaching Auslan as a second language
, from an elective language subject offered by some secondary schools to a two-year full-time diploma at TAFE.
Though becoming more and more visible, Auslan is still rarely seen at public events or on television; there are, for example, no interpreted news services. There is a regular program on community television station Channel 31 in Melbourne
, "Deaf TV", which is entirely in Auslan and is produced by deaf volunteers.
Auslan evolved from sign languages brought to Australia during the nineteenth century from Britain and Ireland. The earliest record of a deaf Australian was convict Elizabeth Steel
, who arrived in 1790 on the Second Fleet
ship "Lady Juliana". There is as yet no historical evidence, however, that she used a sign language. The first known signing deaf immigrant was the engraver John Carmichael who arrived in Sydney in 1825 from Edinburgh
. He had been to a deaf school there, and was known as a good storyteller in sign language.
Thirty-five years later, in 1860, a school for the deaf was established by another deaf Scotsman, Thomas Pattison — the Royal Institute for Deaf and Blind Children
in New South Wales
. In Victoria
just a few weeks later, the Victorian College for the Deaf
was founded by a deaf Englishman, Frederick J Rose
, who had been educated at the Old Kent Road School in London
. These schools and others had an enormous role in the development of Auslan, as they were the first contact with sign language for many deaf children. Because they were residential boarding school
s, they provided ample opportunity for the language to thrive, even though in many schools, signing was banned from the classroom for much of the 20th century.
Irish Sign Language
(ISL) also had an influence on the development of Auslan, as it was used in Catholic schools until the 1950s. The first Catholic school for deaf children was established in 1875 by Irish nuns. Unlike British Sign Language
, ISL uses a one-handed alphabet originating in French Sign Language
(LSF), and although this alphabet has now almost disappeared from Australia, some initialised signs from the Irish alphabet can still be seen.
In more recent times Auslan has seen a significant amount of lexical borrowing
from American Sign Language
(ASL), especially in signs for technical terms. Some of these arose from the signed English educational philosophies of the 1970s and 80s, when a committee looking for signs with direct equivalence to English words found them in ASL and/or in invented English-based signed systems used in North America and introduced them in the classroom. ASL contains many signs initialised from an alphabet which was also derived from LSF, and Auslan users, already familiar with the related ISL alphabet, accepted many of the new signs easily.
share a sign-language. Auslan is a natural language
distinct from spoken or written English
. Its grammar and vocabulary often do not have direct English equivalents and vice versa. However, English, as the dominant language in Australia, has had a significant influence on Auslan, especially through manual forms such as fingerspelling
and (more recently) Signed English.
It is difficult to sign Auslan fluently while speaking English, as the word order is different, and there is often no direct sign-to-word equivalence. However, mouthing
of an English word together with a sign may serve to clarify when one sign may have several English equivalents. In some cases the mouth gesture that accompanies a sign may not reflect the equivalent translation in English (e.g. a sign meaning 'thick' may be accompanied by a mouthed 'fahth').
A two-handed manual alphabet, identical to the one used in British Sign Language and New Zealand Sign Language, is integral to Auslan. This alphabet is used for fingerspelling proper nouns such as personal or place names, common nouns for everyday objects, and English words, especially technical terms, for which there is no widely used sign. Fingerspelling can also be used for emphasis
, clarification
, or, sometimes extensively, by English-speaking learners of Auslan. The amount of fingerspelling varies with the context and the age of the signer. A recent small-scale study puts fingerspelled words in Auslan conversations at about 10% of all lexical items, roughly equal to ASL and higher than many other sign languages, such as New Zealand Sign Language. The proportion is higher in older signers, suggesting that the use of fingerspelling has diminished over time.
Schembri and Johnston (in press) found that the most commonly fingerspelled words in Auslan include "so", "to", "if" and "but" and "do".
Some signs also feature an English word's initial letter as a handshape from a one- or two-handed manual alphabet and use it within a sign. For example, part of the sign for "Canberra" incorporates the letter "C".
Australasian Signed English was created in the late 1970s to represent English words and grammar, using mostly Auslan signs together with some additional contrived signs, as well as borrowings from American Sign Language (ASL). It was, and still is, used largely in education for teaching English to deaf children or for discussing English in academic contexts. It was thought to be much easier for hearing teachers and parents to learn another mode of English than to learn a new language with a complex spatial grammar such as Auslan.
The use of Signed English in schools is controversial with some in the deaf community, who regard Signed English as a contrived and unnatural artificially constructed language
. Signed English has now been largely rejected by deaf communities in Australia and its use in education is dwindling; however a number of its signs have made their way into normal use.
in adolescence or adulthood, after attempting to learn English (or another spoken/written language) without the exposure necessary to properly acquire it. The Deaf community often distinguish between "oral deaf" who grew up in an oral
or signed English educational environment without Auslan, and those "deaf deaf" who learnt Auslan at an early age from Deaf parents or at a deaf school. Regardless of their background, many Deaf adults consider Auslan to be their first or primary language, and see themselves as users of English as a second language
.
There is no standard dialect of Auslan. Standard dialects arise through the support of institutions, such as the media, education, government and the law. As this support has not existed for most sign languages, coupled with the lack of a widely used written form and communications technologies, Auslan has diverged much more rapidly than Australian English
.
and NSW
), and Southern (Victoria
, Tasmania
, South Australia
, and Western Australia
). The vocabulary of the two dialects differs significantly, with different signs used even for very common concepts such as colors, animals, and days of the week; differences in grammar appear to be slight.
These two dialects may have roots in older dialectic differences from the United Kingdom, brought over by Deaf immigrants who founded the first schools for the deaf in Australia — English varieties (from London) in Melbourne and Scottish ones (from Edinburgh) in Sydney
, although the relationship between lexical variation in the UK and Australia appears much more complicated than this (some Auslan signs appear similar to signs used in the Newcastle variety of BSL, for example). Before schools were established elsewhere, deaf children attended one of these two initial schools, and brought signs back to their own states. As schools opened up in each state, new signs also developed in the dormitories and playgrounds of these institutions. As a result, Auslan users can identify more precise regional varieties (e.g., "Sydney sign", "Melbourne sign", "Perth sign", "Adelaide sign" and "Brisbane sign"). In a conversation between two strangers, one from Melbourne and the other from Perth, it is likely that one will use a small number of signs unfamiliar to the other, despite both belonging to the same "southern dialect". Signers can often identify which school someone went to, even within a few short utterances.
Despite these differences, communication between Auslan users from different regions poses little difficulty for most Deaf Australians, who often become aware of different regional vocabulary as they grow older, through travel and Deaf community networks, and because Deaf people are so well practised in bridging barriers to communication.
A number of Indigenous Australian
sign languages exist, unrelated to Auslan, such as Warlpiri Sign Language
. They occur in the southern, central, and western desert regions, coastal Arnhem Land
, some islands of north coast, the western side of Cape York Peninsula
, and on some Torres Strait Islands
. They have also been noted as far south as the Murray River
.
Deaf Indigenous people of Far North Queensland
(extending from Yarrabah
to Cape York
) form a distinct signing community using a dialect
of Auslan; it has features of indigenous sign languages and gestural systems as well as signs and grammar of Auslan.
or online dictionaries.
SignWriting
, however, has its adherents in Australia.
Deaf signers generally read and write in English, though the average deaf Australian's knowledge of English is poor.
Sign language
A sign language is a language which, instead of acoustically conveyed sound patterns, uses visually transmitted sign patterns to convey meaning—simultaneously combining hand shapes, orientation and movement of the hands, arms or body, and facial expressions to fluidly express a speaker's...
of the Australia
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
n deaf community. The term Auslan is an acronym of "Australian sign language", coined by Trevor Johnston in the early 1980s, although the language
Language
Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...
itself is much older. Auslan is related to British Sign Language
British Sign Language
British Sign Language is the sign language used in the United Kingdom , and is the first or preferred language of some deaf people in the UK; there are 125,000 deaf adults in the UK who use BSL plus an estimated 20,000 children. The language makes use of space and involves movement of the hands,...
(BSL) and Scottish Sign Language (SSL); the three have descended from the same parent language
Proto-language
A proto-language in the tree model of historical linguistics is the common ancestor of the languages that form a language family. Occasionally, the German term Ursprache is used instead.Often the proto-language is not known directly...
, and together comprise the BASSL Language Family. Auslan has also been influenced by Irish Sign Language
Irish Sign Language
Irish Sign Language is the sign language of Ireland, used primarily in the Republic of Ireland. It is also used in Northern Ireland, though British Sign Language is also used. Irish Sign Language is more closely related to French Sign Language than to British Sign Language, which was first used...
(ISL) and more recently has borrowed signs from American Sign Language
American Sign Language
American Sign Language, or ASL, for a time also called Ameslan, is the dominant sign language of Deaf Americans, including deaf communities in the United States, in the English-speaking parts of Canada, and in some regions of Mexico...
(ASL).
As with other sign languages, Auslan's grammar
Grammar
In linguistics, grammar is the set of structural rules that govern the composition of clauses, phrases, and words in any given natural language. The term refers also to the study of such rules, and this field includes morphology, syntax, and phonology, often complemented by phonetics, semantics,...
and vocabulary
Vocabulary
A person's vocabulary is the set of words within a language that are familiar to that person. A vocabulary usually develops with age, and serves as a useful and fundamental tool for communication and acquiring knowledge...
is quite distinct from English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
. Its invention cannot be attributed to any individual; rather, it is a natural language
Natural language
In the philosophy of language, a natural language is any language which arises in an unpremeditated fashion as the result of the innate facility for language possessed by the human intellect. A natural language is typically used for communication, and may be spoken, signed, or written...
that developed organically over time.
The number of people for whom Auslan is their primary or preferred language is difficult to determine. Recent studies have put the figure at 6500, a much lower figure than was previously thought, though a 2006 census showed 7150 used the language. The number may be diminishing, and although Auslan's status and recognition is growing, there is some speculation that it is an endangered language
Endangered language
An endangered language is a language that is at risk of falling out of use. If it loses all its native speakers, it becomes a dead language. If eventually no one speaks the language at all it becomes an "extinct language"....
. Of those who use Auslan as their main language, only about 5% learned it from their parents, with the rest acquiring it from peers at school or later in life.
Recognition and status
Auslan was recognised by the Australian government as a "community language other than English" and the preferred language of the deaf community in policy statements in 1987 and 1991. However, this recognition is yet to filter through to many institutions, government departments and professionals who work with deaf people.The emerging status of Auslan has gone hand-in-hand with the advancement of the deaf community in Australia, beginning in the early 1980s. In 1982, the registration of the first sign language interpreters by NAATI, a newly established regulatory body for interpreting and translating, accorded a sense of legitimacy to Auslan, furthered by the publishing of the first dictionary
Dictionary
A dictionary is a collection of words in one or more specific languages, often listed alphabetically, with usage information, definitions, etymologies, phonetics, pronunciations, and other information; or a book of words in one language with their equivalents in another, also known as a lexicon...
of Auslan in 1989. Auslan began to emerge as a language of instruction for deaf students in secondary schools in the 1990s — mainly through the provision of interpreters in mainstream (hearing) schools with deaf support units. Boosted by the 1992 enactment of the federal Disability Discrimination Act, sign language interpreters are also increasingly provided in tertiary education.
Today there is a growing number of courses teaching Auslan as a second language
Second language
A second language or L2 is any language learned after the first language or mother tongue. Some languages, often called auxiliary languages, are used primarily as second languages or lingua francas ....
, from an elective language subject offered by some secondary schools to a two-year full-time diploma at TAFE.
Though becoming more and more visible, Auslan is still rarely seen at public events or on television; there are, for example, no interpreted news services. There is a regular program on community television station Channel 31 in Melbourne
Melbourne
Melbourne is the capital and most populous city in the state of Victoria, and the second most populous city in Australia. The Melbourne City Centre is the hub of the greater metropolitan area and the Census statistical division—of which "Melbourne" is the common name. As of June 2009, the greater...
, "Deaf TV", which is entirely in Auslan and is produced by deaf volunteers.
History
Elizabeth Steel
Elizabeth Steel arrived in Sydney Cove as a convict on board the Lady Juliana on 3 June 1790, as part of the Second Fleet, aged 23 or 24. At the time of her sentencing authorities described her as being ‘mute by visitation of God’, which is the earliest record of a deaf Australian, but there is no...
, who arrived in 1790 on the Second Fleet
Second Fleet (Australia)
The Second Fleet is the name of the second fleet of ships sent with settlers, convicts and supplies to colony at Sydney Cove in Port Jackson, Australia. The fleet comprised six ships: one Royal Navy escort, four convict ships, and a supply ship....
ship "Lady Juliana". There is as yet no historical evidence, however, that she used a sign language. The first known signing deaf immigrant was the engraver John Carmichael who arrived in Sydney in 1825 from Edinburgh
Edinburgh
Edinburgh is the capital city of Scotland, the second largest city in Scotland, and the eighth most populous in the United Kingdom. The City of Edinburgh Council governs one of Scotland's 32 local government council areas. The council area includes urban Edinburgh and a rural area...
. He had been to a deaf school there, and was known as a good storyteller in sign language.
Thirty-five years later, in 1860, a school for the deaf was established by another deaf Scotsman, Thomas Pattison — the Royal Institute for Deaf and Blind Children
Royal Institute for Deaf and Blind Children
The Royal Institute for Deaf and Blind Children in Sydney provides a range of educational services for students with vision and/or hearing impairment, including specialist schools for signing deaf students, oral deaf students, and students with sensory and intellectual disabilities.RIDBC offers...
in New South Wales
New South Wales
New South Wales is a state of :Australia, located in the east of the country. It is bordered by Queensland, Victoria and South Australia to the north, south and west respectively. To the east, the state is bordered by the Tasman Sea, which forms part of the Pacific Ocean. New South Wales...
. In Victoria
Victoria (Australia)
Victoria is the second most populous state in Australia. Geographically the smallest mainland state, Victoria is bordered by New South Wales, South Australia, and Tasmania on Boundary Islet to the north, west and south respectively....
just a few weeks later, the Victorian College for the Deaf
Victorian College for the Deaf
The Victorian College for the Deaf , located on St Kilda Road in Melbourne, Australia, is Victoria's oldest deaf school, opening in 1860. It currently provides education in Auslan, the language of the Australian Deaf community, from prep through to year 12...
was founded by a deaf Englishman, Frederick J Rose
Frederick J Rose
Frederick John Rose was the Headmaster-Superintendent of Victorian School for Deaf Children from 1860 to 1891.- Biography :...
, who had been educated at the Old Kent Road School in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
. These schools and others had an enormous role in the development of Auslan, as they were the first contact with sign language for many deaf children. Because they were residential boarding school
Boarding school
A boarding school is a school where some or all pupils study and live during the school year with their fellow students and possibly teachers and/or administrators. The word 'boarding' is used in the sense of "bed and board," i.e., lodging and meals...
s, they provided ample opportunity for the language to thrive, even though in many schools, signing was banned from the classroom for much of the 20th century.
Irish Sign Language
Irish Sign Language
Irish Sign Language is the sign language of Ireland, used primarily in the Republic of Ireland. It is also used in Northern Ireland, though British Sign Language is also used. Irish Sign Language is more closely related to French Sign Language than to British Sign Language, which was first used...
(ISL) also had an influence on the development of Auslan, as it was used in Catholic schools until the 1950s. The first Catholic school for deaf children was established in 1875 by Irish nuns. Unlike British Sign Language
British Sign Language
British Sign Language is the sign language used in the United Kingdom , and is the first or preferred language of some deaf people in the UK; there are 125,000 deaf adults in the UK who use BSL plus an estimated 20,000 children. The language makes use of space and involves movement of the hands,...
, ISL uses a one-handed alphabet originating in French Sign Language
French Sign Language
French Sign Language is the sign language of the deaf in the nation of France. According to Ethnologue, it has 50,000 to 100,000 native signers....
(LSF), and although this alphabet has now almost disappeared from Australia, some initialised signs from the Irish alphabet can still be seen.
In more recent times Auslan has seen a significant amount of lexical borrowing
Loanword
A loanword is a word borrowed from a donor language and incorporated into a recipient language. By contrast, a calque or loan translation is a related concept where the meaning or idiom is borrowed rather than the lexical item itself. The word loanword is itself a calque of the German Lehnwort,...
from American Sign Language
American Sign Language
American Sign Language, or ASL, for a time also called Ameslan, is the dominant sign language of Deaf Americans, including deaf communities in the United States, in the English-speaking parts of Canada, and in some regions of Mexico...
(ASL), especially in signs for technical terms. Some of these arose from the signed English educational philosophies of the 1970s and 80s, when a committee looking for signs with direct equivalence to English words found them in ASL and/or in invented English-based signed systems used in North America and introduced them in the classroom. ASL contains many signs initialised from an alphabet which was also derived from LSF, and Auslan users, already familiar with the related ISL alphabet, accepted many of the new signs easily.
Auslan in relation to English
It is sometimes wrongly assumed that English-speaking countriesAnglosphere
Anglosphere is a neologism which refers to those nations with English as the most common language. The term can be used more specifically to refer to those nations which share certain characteristics within their cultures based on a linguistic heritage, through being former British colonies...
share a sign-language. Auslan is a natural language
Natural language
In the philosophy of language, a natural language is any language which arises in an unpremeditated fashion as the result of the innate facility for language possessed by the human intellect. A natural language is typically used for communication, and may be spoken, signed, or written...
distinct from spoken or written English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
. Its grammar and vocabulary often do not have direct English equivalents and vice versa. However, English, as the dominant language in Australia, has had a significant influence on Auslan, especially through manual forms such as fingerspelling
Fingerspelling
Fingerspelling is the representation of the letters of a writing system, and sometimes numeral systems, using only the hands. These manual alphabets , have often been used in deaf education, and have subsequently been adopted as a distinct part of a number of sign languages around the world...
and (more recently) Signed English.
It is difficult to sign Auslan fluently while speaking English, as the word order is different, and there is often no direct sign-to-word equivalence. However, mouthing
Mouthing
In sign language, mouthing is the production of visual syllables with the mouth while signing. Although not present in all sign languages, and sometimes not in signers at all levels of education, where it does occur it may be an essential element of a sign, distinguishing signs which would...
of an English word together with a sign may serve to clarify when one sign may have several English equivalents. In some cases the mouth gesture that accompanies a sign may not reflect the equivalent translation in English (e.g. a sign meaning 'thick' may be accompanied by a mouthed 'fahth').
Fingerspelling
Emphasis
Emphasis or emphatic may refer to:* Emphasis , intentional alteration of the amplitude-vs.-frequency characteristics of the signal to reduce adverse effects of noise...
, clarification
Clarification
In journalism, a clarification is used to make a statement in a published story more clear. It refers to a statement in a story that, while factually correct, may be subject to a misunderstanding or unfair assumption....
, or, sometimes extensively, by English-speaking learners of Auslan. The amount of fingerspelling varies with the context and the age of the signer. A recent small-scale study puts fingerspelled words in Auslan conversations at about 10% of all lexical items, roughly equal to ASL and higher than many other sign languages, such as New Zealand Sign Language. The proportion is higher in older signers, suggesting that the use of fingerspelling has diminished over time.
Schembri and Johnston (in press) found that the most commonly fingerspelled words in Auslan include "so", "to", "if" and "but" and "do".
Some signs also feature an English word's initial letter as a handshape from a one- or two-handed manual alphabet and use it within a sign. For example, part of the sign for "Canberra" incorporates the letter "C".
Signed English
- See main article Signed English
Australasian Signed English was created in the late 1970s to represent English words and grammar, using mostly Auslan signs together with some additional contrived signs, as well as borrowings from American Sign Language (ASL). It was, and still is, used largely in education for teaching English to deaf children or for discussing English in academic contexts. It was thought to be much easier for hearing teachers and parents to learn another mode of English than to learn a new language with a complex spatial grammar such as Auslan.
The use of Signed English in schools is controversial with some in the deaf community, who regard Signed English as a contrived and unnatural artificially constructed language
Constructed language
A planned or constructed language—known colloquially as a conlang—is a language whose phonology, grammar, and/or vocabulary has been consciously devised by an individual or group, instead of having evolved naturally...
. Signed English has now been largely rejected by deaf communities in Australia and its use in education is dwindling; however a number of its signs have made their way into normal use.
Acquisition and nativeness
Unlike spoken languages, only a minority of deaf children acquire their language from their parents (about 4 or 5% have deaf parents). Most acquire Auslan from deaf peers at school or later through Deaf community networks. Many learn Auslan as a 'delayed' first languageFirst language
A first language is the language a person has learned from birth or within the critical period, or that a person speaks the best and so is often the basis for sociolinguistic identity...
in adolescence or adulthood, after attempting to learn English (or another spoken/written language) without the exposure necessary to properly acquire it. The Deaf community often distinguish between "oral deaf" who grew up in an oral
Oralism
Oralism is the education of deaf students through spoken language by using lip reading, speech, and mimicking the mouth shapes and breathing patterns of speech instead of using sign language within the classroom...
or signed English educational environment without Auslan, and those "deaf deaf" who learnt Auslan at an early age from Deaf parents or at a deaf school. Regardless of their background, many Deaf adults consider Auslan to be their first or primary language, and see themselves as users of English as a second language
English language learning and teaching
English as a second language , English for speakers of other languages and English as a foreign language all refer to the use or study of English by speakers with different native languages. The precise usage, including the different use of the terms ESL and ESOL in different countries, is...
.
Variation and standardisation
Auslan exhibits a high degree of variation, determined by the signer's age, educational background and regional origin, and the signing community is very tolerant of individual differences in signing style.There is no standard dialect of Auslan. Standard dialects arise through the support of institutions, such as the media, education, government and the law. As this support has not existed for most sign languages, coupled with the lack of a widely used written form and communications technologies, Auslan has diverged much more rapidly than Australian English
Australian English
Australian English is the name given to the group of dialects spoken in Australia that form a major variety of the English language....
.
Dialects
Linguists often regard Auslan as having two major dialects - Northern (QueenslandQueensland
Queensland is a state of Australia, occupying the north-eastern section of the mainland continent. It is bordered by the Northern Territory, South Australia and New South Wales to the west, south-west and south respectively. To the east, Queensland is bordered by the Coral Sea and Pacific Ocean...
and NSW
New South Wales
New South Wales is a state of :Australia, located in the east of the country. It is bordered by Queensland, Victoria and South Australia to the north, south and west respectively. To the east, the state is bordered by the Tasman Sea, which forms part of the Pacific Ocean. New South Wales...
), and Southern (Victoria
Victoria (Australia)
Victoria is the second most populous state in Australia. Geographically the smallest mainland state, Victoria is bordered by New South Wales, South Australia, and Tasmania on Boundary Islet to the north, west and south respectively....
, Tasmania
Tasmania
Tasmania is an Australian island and state. It is south of the continent, separated by Bass Strait. The state includes the island of Tasmania—the 26th largest island in the world—and the surrounding islands. The state has a population of 507,626 , of whom almost half reside in the greater Hobart...
, South Australia
South Australia
South Australia is a state of Australia in the southern central part of the country. It covers some of the most arid parts of the continent; with a total land area of , it is the fourth largest of Australia's six states and two territories.South Australia shares borders with all of the mainland...
, and Western Australia
Western Australia
Western Australia is a state of Australia, occupying the entire western third of the Australian continent. It is bounded by the Indian Ocean to the north and west, the Great Australian Bight and Indian Ocean to the south, the Northern Territory to the north-east and South Australia to the south-east...
). The vocabulary of the two dialects differs significantly, with different signs used even for very common concepts such as colors, animals, and days of the week; differences in grammar appear to be slight.
These two dialects may have roots in older dialectic differences from the United Kingdom, brought over by Deaf immigrants who founded the first schools for the deaf in Australia — English varieties (from London) in Melbourne and Scottish ones (from Edinburgh) in Sydney
Sydney
Sydney is the most populous city in Australia and the state capital of New South Wales. Sydney is located on Australia's south-east coast of the Tasman Sea. As of June 2010, the greater metropolitan area had an approximate population of 4.6 million people...
, although the relationship between lexical variation in the UK and Australia appears much more complicated than this (some Auslan signs appear similar to signs used in the Newcastle variety of BSL, for example). Before schools were established elsewhere, deaf children attended one of these two initial schools, and brought signs back to their own states. As schools opened up in each state, new signs also developed in the dormitories and playgrounds of these institutions. As a result, Auslan users can identify more precise regional varieties (e.g., "Sydney sign", "Melbourne sign", "Perth sign", "Adelaide sign" and "Brisbane sign"). In a conversation between two strangers, one from Melbourne and the other from Perth, it is likely that one will use a small number of signs unfamiliar to the other, despite both belonging to the same "southern dialect". Signers can often identify which school someone went to, even within a few short utterances.
Despite these differences, communication between Auslan users from different regions poses little difficulty for most Deaf Australians, who often become aware of different regional vocabulary as they grow older, through travel and Deaf community networks, and because Deaf people are so well practised in bridging barriers to communication.
Indigenous Australian sign languages and Auslan
- See main article: Australian Aboriginal sign languagesAustralian Aboriginal sign languagesMany Australian Aboriginal cultures have or traditionally had a manually coded language, a sign-language counterpart of their spoken language. This appears to be connected with various speech taboos between certain kin or at particular times, such as during a mourning period for women or during...
.
A number of Indigenous Australian
Indigenous Australians
Indigenous Australians are the original inhabitants of the Australian continent and nearby islands. The Aboriginal Indigenous Australians migrated from the Indian continent around 75,000 to 100,000 years ago....
sign languages exist, unrelated to Auslan, such as Warlpiri Sign Language
Warlpiri Sign Language
Warlpiri Sign Language is a sign language used by the Warlpiri, an Aboriginal community in the central desert region of Australia. It is one of the most elaborate, and certainly the most studied, of all Australian Aboriginal sign languages.-Social context:...
. They occur in the southern, central, and western desert regions, coastal Arnhem Land
Arnhem Land
The Arnhem Land Region is one of the five regions of the Northern Territory of Australia. It is located in the north-eastern corner of the territory and is around 500 km from the territory capital Darwin. The region has an area of 97,000 km² which also covers the area of Kakadu National...
, some islands of north coast, the western side of Cape York Peninsula
Cape York Peninsula
Cape York Peninsula is a large remote peninsula located in Far North Queensland at the tip of the state of Queensland, Australia, the largest unspoilt wilderness in northern Australia and one of the last remaining wilderness areas on Earth...
, and on some Torres Strait Islands
Torres Strait Islands
The Torres Strait Islands are a group of at least 274 small islands which lie in Torres Strait, the waterway separating far northern continental Australia's Cape York Peninsula and the island of New Guinea but Torres Strait Island known and Recognize as Nyumaria.The islands are mostly part of...
. They have also been noted as far south as the Murray River
Murray River
The Murray River is Australia's longest river. At in length, the Murray rises in the Australian Alps, draining the western side of Australia's highest mountains and, for most of its length, meanders across Australia's inland plains, forming the border between New South Wales and Victoria as it...
.
Deaf Indigenous people of Far North Queensland
Far North Queensland
Far North Queensland, or FNQ, is the northernmost part of the Australian state of Queensland. The region, which contains a large section of the Tropical North Queensland area, stretches from the city of Cairns north to the Torres Strait...
(extending from Yarrabah
Yarrabah, Queensland
Yarrabah is an Aboriginal community situated approximately by road from Cairns CBD on Cape Grafton. It is much closer by direct-line distance but is separated from Cairns by the Murray Prior Range and an inlet of the Coral Sea. At the 2006 census, Yarrabah had a population of 2,371...
to Cape York
Cape York Peninsula
Cape York Peninsula is a large remote peninsula located in Far North Queensland at the tip of the state of Queensland, Australia, the largest unspoilt wilderness in northern Australia and one of the last remaining wilderness areas on Earth...
) form a distinct signing community using a dialect
Dialect
The term dialect is used in two distinct ways, even by linguists. One usage refers to a variety of a language that is a characteristic of a particular group of the language's speakers. The term is applied most often to regional speech patterns, but a dialect may also be defined by other factors,...
of Auslan; it has features of indigenous sign languages and gestural systems as well as signs and grammar of Auslan.
Written and recorded Auslan
Auslan has no widely used written form; transcribing Auslan in the past was largely an academic exercise. The first Auslan dictionaries used either photographs or drawings with motion arrows to describe signs; more recently, technology has made possible the use of short video clips on CD-ROMCD-ROM
A CD-ROM is a pre-pressed compact disc that contains data accessible to, but not writable by, a computer for data storage and music playback. The 1985 “Yellow Book” standard developed by Sony and Philips adapted the format to hold any form of binary data....
or online dictionaries.
SignWriting
SignWriting
SignWriting is a system of writing sign languages. It is highly featural and visually iconic, both in the shapes of the characters, which are abstract pictures of the hands, face, and body, and in their spatial arrangement on the page, which does not follow a sequential order like the letters that...
, however, has its adherents in Australia.
Deaf signers generally read and write in English, though the average deaf Australian's knowledge of English is poor.
Further reading
- Johnston, T. & Schembri, A. (2007). Australian Sign Language (Auslan): An introduction to sign language linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Johnston, T.A. & Wilkin, P. (1998). Signs of Australia : A new dictionary of Auslan (the sign language of the Australian deaf community). North Rocks, NSW, Australia : North Rocks Press : Royal Institute for Deaf and Blind Children.
External links
- www.auslan.org.au - An online dictionary of Auslan video clips
- ASLIA - Australian Sign Language Interpreters Association
- Auslan entry on ethnologue.com
- Auslan online dictionaries /
- http://www.signbank.org/SignPuddle1.5/index.php?ui=1&sgn=42