I feel the need to begin this blog with a warning...I AM going to offend some readers.
I am sick of the 'ownership' battle over Auslan (Australian Sign Language) that goes on in this country. For goodness sake !
Auslan is a language, and like all languages it flows and grows. Stay with me here....it is like a river. It winds a path from the depths of the forest and farm land through the smallest towns and biggest cities. On it's way people may influence its path, put things in and take things out. People downstream are influenced by the actions of those up-steam; and tributaries may seem isolated, but even they see the effects of others before them and send items downstream.
And so it is with languages.
Every language finds roots in its past, but also grows and branches out in many directions. Some events effect one branch more than others. For example, the rise of the internet has seen the word 'google' to move from a word to define a strong stare, to a means to look for items on the internet. From an unusual word, to one that finds its place in daily communication...at least in the young...but far less so in the old. in fact you may well find large numbers of our elderly community whose language has had little influence by the rise of the internet and for whom WTF remains a random set of letters and not an announcement of astonishment and questioning :)
So lets come back to Auslan shall we. It too is evolving everyday...and it always has. You only need to spend some time with out antique dictionaries - as I have in resent weeks - to see that. Which brings me to my exciting discovery in an antique book shop. You are not going to believe this but I found an Auslan dictionary from 1942! Can you believe it. It even has hand written notes in it from a teacher at Royal Institute of the Deaf to the books owner, talking about how they sign some things differently.
So I guess that brings me to my real beef here....Mr 'I am the Godfather of sign' Trevor Johnson. Ohh ego large much? I could not believe it when he first declared this little piece of pompous rubbish some years ago now on ABC radio, but to see it in print again recently just refueled my annoyance at the ego of this linguistic theorist.
You know the problem with linguists? Linguists, by there very nature want to hold a language still. Freeze it and look at it. Examine it as it is in that set moment of time. But a language can no more be held still than a river (ok forget dams for a minute - although even they fill up and overflow eventually). A language is forever flowing, growing, changing, evolving. Flowing in new directions. Evolving to adapt to it's changing environment. That is why a linguistic analysis is always out of date. Always looking backwards instead of forwards.
Look I am not saying there is nothing to be learned from the past...but just don't get stuck there.
You know what I love about Auslan now and in the future...the internet. Video chat has change our language and will dramatically change it's future. I already see it's influence in the language of the next generation as i travel around OZ. Where once the kids in remote outback areas were ostracized by their geographic location, and their language reflected this. They often used 'old signs' in very English ordered grammar. This was natural as their language came to them via old dictionaries - like the archaic Signs Of Australia from the 1970's; and they rarely got to converse with other fluent signers, so naturally their grammar was very English in nature. Today, however I see something very very different.
I recently came back from another regional tour - Victoria this time...and what did I see. I saw teenagers as remote as can be, fluently signing and chatting to me about friends in cities like Brisbane, Sydney, and Perth. They are the national generation. As an interesting result I also no longer see the 'dialects' we saw so strongly in the past.
It was natural that such a large country would have dialects in our sign language. After all it is a visual language. Casting back in time, before the internet, before the car even...how were deaf communities to share their signs between cities, or even towns. It was natural to find two dialects evolve around the two large Deaf schools (Sydney and Melbourne). It was completely understandable to find even smaller dialect regions, in rural towns, like Sale (VIC) for example; whose older generation signers have distinctive dialect from those of the same age in the neighboring town.
Today I see a more national evolution of Auslan. An instant shared evolution across hundreds of km. Isn't that exciting and fantastic...
let's keep looking forward, together, shall we, because it is a very exciting place to be
