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Abstract
Spoken languages make up only one aspect of the communicative landscape of Indigenous Australia—sign languages are also an important part of their rich and diverse language ecologies. Australian Indigenous sign languages are predominantly used by hearing people as a replacement for speech in certain cultural contexts. Deaf or hard-of-hearing people are also known to make use of these sign languages. In some circumstances, sign may be used alongside speech, and in others it may replace speech altogether. Alternate sign languages such as those found in Australia occupy a particular place in the diversity of the world’s sign languages. However, the focus of research on sign language phonology has almost exclusively been on sign languages used in deaf communities. This paper takes steps towards deepening understandings of signed language phonology by examining the articulatory features of handshape and body locations in the signing practices of three communities in Central and Northern Australia. We demonstrate that, while Australian Indigenous sign languages have some typologically unusual features, they exhibit the same ‘fundamental’ structural characteristics as other sign languages.
Highlights
Australian Indigenous sign languages are predominantly used by hearing people as a replacement for speech in certain cultural contexts when speech is either impractical or inappropriate
We extend the geographical scope of understandings of similarities and differences in the phonological features of Australian Indigenous SLs by looking at signing practices across three communities—Warlpiri (Central Australia), Kukatja
Looking beyond deaf community SLs to a more diverse range of sign languages, we suggest that the size of the signing space used by signers of Australian Indigenous SLs is not as cross-linguistically unusual as it would first seem, but is a tendency found in some small non-urban SLs
Summary
Australian Indigenous sign languages are predominantly used by hearing people as a replacement for speech in certain cultural contexts when speech is either impractical or inappropriate. Following Stokoe’s ([1960] 2005) seminal work on ASL, a number of phonological models have been proposed to account for and describe the structure of sign languages (see Brentari 1998; Sandler 1995; van der Hulst 1993). These models rely on descriptive work which is largely absent in the Australian Indigenous context. Indian Sign Language by Native Americans (Davis 2015; Davis and McKay-Cody 2010) Such alternate SLs are most often developed in hearing communities and they vary in their functions and degree of complexity Sign is used when hunting as a “silent form of coordination” so as to not scare off game (Montredon and Ellis 2014, pp. 11–12); when giving directions; and for communication between interlocutors who are visible to each other yet out of earshot
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