Auslan
Its origin cannot be attributed to any individual; rather, it is a natural language that emerged spontaneously and has changed over time.
[4] However, this recognition has yet to filter through to many institutions, government departments, and professionals who work with deaf people.
[citation needed] The emerging status of Auslan has gone hand-in-hand with the advancement of the Deaf community in Australia, beginning in the early 1980s.
Boosted by the 1992 enactment of the federal Disability Discrimination Act, Auslan/English interpreters are also increasingly provided in tertiary education.
[7] In 2006 David Gibson was the first member of any Parliament in Australia to give a maiden speech in Auslan and was involved in Auslan events for the National Week of Deaf People at the Queensland Parliament, including the use of Auslan interpreters for question time and a debate between members of the deaf community and members of parliament on disability issues in 2007.
[9] Auslan evolved from sign language varieties 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".
One of the first known signing Deaf immigrants was the engraver John Carmichael[11] who arrived in Sydney in 1825 from Edinburgh.
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.
[citation needed] Irish Sign Language (ISL) also had an influence on the development of Auslan, as it was used in Catholic schools until the 1950s.
As such, like Auslan evolving from BSL, Australian Irish Sign Language (or AISL) was born.
[12] In general, word order in Auslan takes into account context and fluidity between signs being used, being less rigid than many spoken languages.
[14] Verbs in Auslan which are depicting signs use head-marking to show the semantic role of the arguments, rather than subject/object.
It is difficult to sign Auslan fluently while speaking English, as the word order may be different, and there is often no direct sign-to-word equivalence.
Auslan exhibits a high degree of variation, determined by the signer's age, educational background, and regional origin, and the signing community is very accepting of a wide range of individual differences in signing style.
Standard dialects arise through the support of institutions, such as the media, education, government and the law.
These two dialects may have roots in older dialectal differences from the United Kingdom, brought over by Deaf immigrants who founded the first schools for the Deaf in Australia — varieties from the southeast of England in Melbourne and Scottish varieties 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 a range of regional varieties of BSL).
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".
[24] A Silent Agreement was Australia's first theatrically released feature film to showcase Australian Sign Language in its main dialogue and as a plot element, with some scenes depicted entirely in Auslan.
There is also one scene where the characters discuss the risky politics of using non-deaf actors using sign language in film.
