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Auslan is the sign language of the Australian Deaf community. The term Auslan is a portmanteau 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 New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL); the three have descended from the same parent language, BANZSL. Auslan has also been influenced by Irish Sign Language (ISL). Like other sign languages, Auslan has a grammar and vocabulary quite distinct from English. Its invention cannot be attributed to any individual; rather, it developed naturally like spoken languages.
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. The number may be diminishing, and although Auslan's status and recognition is growing, there is some speculation that it is an endangered language.
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 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 2-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.
History
Auslan evolved from sign languages brought to Australia during the nineteenth century from Britain and Ireland. The earliest record of a signing deaf Australian was convict Elizabeth Steel, who arrived in 1790 on the Second Fleet ship "Lady Juliana". Another early immigrant known to use sign language 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 signing storyteller.
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 Victoria at about the same time, 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, and as residential boarding schools 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 spread 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
Auslan is a natural language distinct from spoken or written English. Its grammar and vocabulary often do not have direct English counterparts 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 impossible 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 translations. In some cases the lip-pattern for a sign may not match the equivalent word in English (eg. a sign meaning 'thick' may be mouthed 'fahth').
Fingerspelling
A two-handed manual alphabet, indentical 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, or for representing English words (especially for 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 (Schembri & Johnston, in press¹²). The proportion is higher in older signers, suggesting that the use of fingerspelling has diminished over time.Schembri and Johnston (in press)¹² 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
The use of Signed English in schools is controversial 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.
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 language in adolescence or adulthood, after attempting to learn English (or another spoken/written language) without the stimulus necessary to properly acquire it. The deaf community often make distinctions 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 adult deaf people consider Auslan to be their first or primary language, and see themselves as users of English as a second language.
Variation and standardisation
Auslan exhibits a high degree of variation, determined by the signer's age, educational background and geographic location, 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 deaf sign languages, coupled with the lack of a widely used written form and communications technologies, Auslan has diverged much more rapidly than Australian English.
Dialects
Linguists often regard Auslan as having two major dialects - Northern (Queensland 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 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 — London sign in Melbourne and Edinburgh sign in Sydney. Later, as schools were established elsewhere, teachers trained at one of these two initial schools, and brought signs back to their own states.
Auslan users tend to identify more precise regional varieties in the terms "Sydney sign", "Melbourne sign", "Perth sign", "Adelaide sign" and "Queensland sign". In a conversation between two strangers, one from Melbourne and the other from Perth, it is likely that one will use 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 languages.
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.
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-ROM or online dictionaries. Deaf signers generally read and write in English, though the average deaf Australian's knowledge of English is poor.
Further reading
- 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.
See also
External links
- www.SignSwap.com.au - An online image bank or dictionary of printable and searchable images of Auslan Sign Language.
- www.bilby.net - All about Australian Sign Language, from baby sign to fluent Auslan
- AAD - Australian Association of the Deaf
- ASLIA - Australian Sign Language Interpreters Association
- Auslan entry on ethnologue.com
- www.auslan.org.au - An online dictionary of Auslan video clips
References
1 Bellis, M. (2004). Innovations for the hearing impaired. http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/bltty.htm. 2,3 Johnston, T. (2004). W(h)ither the Deaf Community? Population, Genetics, and the Future of Australian Sign Language, American Annals of the Deaf - Volume 148, Number 5, Spring 2004, pp. 358-375. Gallaudet University Press.
4 Lo Bianco, J. (1987). National Policy on Languages. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service.
5 Dawkins, J (1991). Australia's Language: The Australian Language and Literacy Policy. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service.
- It is now increasingly recognised that signing deaf people constitute a group like any other non-English speaking language group in Australia, with a distinct sub-culture recognised by shared history, social life and sense of identity, united and symbolised by fluency in Auslan, the principal means of communication within the Australian Deaf Community (Page 20).
6 Flynn, J. (2001) A brief history of sign language interpreting in Australia. http://www.aslia.com.au/vic/history.htm.
7 Mitchell, R.E. & Karchmer, M.A. (2004). Chasing the mythical ten percent: Parental hearing status of deaf and hard of hearing students in the United States. Sign Language Studies 4 (2).
8 Branson J, Miller D (1995). The story of Betty Steel : deaf convict and pioneer, in: Australian's deaf heritage; Deafness Resources Australia, Petersham NSW. ISBN 0-6462-1735-6.
9 Carty, B. (2000). John Carmichael: Australian Deaf pioneer. In A. Schembri, J. Napier, R. Beattie & G. R. Leigh (Eds.), Proceedings of the Australasian Deaf Studies Research Symposium, Renwick College, Sydney, August 22-23, 1998. (pp. 9-20). Sydney: North Rocks Press.
10 O'Reilly, S. (2005). Indigenous Sign Language and Culture; the interpreting and access needs of Deaf people who are of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander in Far North Queensland. Sponsored by ASLIA, the Australian Sign Language Interpreters Association.
11 Walker, L, Munro, J & Rickards, F.W. (1999). Literal and inferential reading comprehension of students who are deaf or hard of hearing, Volta Review, 100, 2, 87-103.
- This study suggested that the average reading age for Victorian Deaf school-leavers was at Grade 6 level, equivalent to 11 or 12-year old hearing children.
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