Auslan

From DeafWiki

Auslan, or Australian Sign Language is the sign language of the Australian Deaf community. Some British Deaf immigrants or free settlers came to Australia in the early 19th Century, although it is known that Betty Steel was a Deaf convict in HMS Lady Juliana in the Second Fleet arriving in Port Jackson (now Sydney) in June, 1790.

Thomas Pattison, a Deaf Scot, opened a first deaf school in Sydney in October, 1860, and, three weeks later, Frederick J. Rose, a former deaf Old Kent Road School (London) pupil, established the school in St. Kilda Road, Melbourne.

It is believed that there are fewer than 6,500 deaf Auslan users in Australia, (population: 20 million) with only 5-10% of signers acquiring it as a first language. (Johnson and Schembri, 2006) From 1993 statistics, 1% of the population use non-verbal forms of communication, which include not only Auslan, but signed English and fingerspelling.

Auslan has its' roots in British Sign Language, and has adopted the same fingerspelling signs, which are two-handed and different to one-handed alphabets.

Dialects

Auslan is split into two broad dialects, which are split between the Sydney (Northern) and Melbourne (Southern) schools. It may be because of the origins of the schools' founder-teachers, and the influence of learning a particular dialect at a particular school.

References

Johnston, T. & Schembri, A. (2006). Issues in the creation of a digital archive of a signed language. In L. Barwick & N. Thieberger (Eds.), Sustainable data from digital fieldwork (pp. 7-16). Sydney: Sydney University Press. Available online: http://hdl.handle.net/2123/1289

Main Language Spoken at Home, 1997 http://www.abs.gov.au/Ausstats/abs@.nsf/Latestproducts/73F31F1AF232E94DCA25697E0018FE4E?opendocument

The Auslan Signbank at http://www.auslan.org.au/ is an online dictionary, with short videos of signs.