Australia has a sign language known as Auslan, which is the main language of about 6, 500 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 more recent times Auslan has seen a significant amount of lexical borrowing from American Sign Language ( ASL ), especially in signs for technical terms.

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.

As this support has not existed for most sign languages, coupled with the lack of a widely used written form and communications technologies, Auslan has diverged much more rapidly than Australian English.

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.

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.

It has been used in British Sign Language and Auslan since at least the 19th century, and in New Zealand Sign Language since the 1970s.

Tertiary education in the US for some deaf Australian adults also accounts for some ASL borrowings found in modern Auslan.

Irish Sign Language ( ISL ) also had an influence on the development of Auslan, as it was used in Catholic schools until the 1950s.

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.

Fingerspelling can also be used for emphasis, clarification, or, sometimes extensively, by English-speaking learners of Auslan.

However, an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander dialect of Auslan exists in Far North Queensland ( extending from Yarrabah to Cape York ), which is heavily influenced by the indigenous sign languages and gestural systems of the region.

The term Auslan is an acronym of " Australian sign language ", coined by Trevor Johnston in the early 1980s, although the language itself is much older.

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.

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.

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 two-year full-time diploma at TAFE.

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.

Auslan exhibits a high degree of variation, determined by the signer's age, educational background and regional origin, and the signing community is very tolerant of individual differences in signing style.

These two dialects may 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 — English varieties ( from London ) in Melbourne and Scottish ones ( from Edinburgh ) 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 the Newcastle variety of BSL, for example ).

ISL was brought by Catholic missionaries to Australia and South Africa, and to Scotland and England, with remnants of ISL still visible in some variants of BSL, especially in Glasgow, and with some elderly Auslan Catholics still using ISL today.

In Australia, ' Signed English ' was developed by a committee in the late 1970s, who took signs from Auslan ( especially the southern dialect ), invented new signs, and borrowed a number of signs from American Sign Language that have now made their way into everyday use in Auslan.

The sign languages used in Australia and New Zealand, Auslan and New Zealand Sign Language, respectively, evolved largely from 19th century BSL, and all retain the same manual alphabet and grammar and possess similar lexicons.

Further information will be available after the completion of the BSL corpus is completed and allows for comparison with the Auslan corpus and the Sociolinguistic Variation in New Zealand Sign Language project.

Auslan is related to British Sign Language ( BSL ); the three have descended from the same parent language, and together comprise the BANZSL language family.

A two-handed manual alphabet, identical to the one used in British Sign Language and New Zealand Sign Language, is integral to Auslan.

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.

Australasian Signed English was created in the late 1970s to represent English words and grammar, using mostly Auslan signs together with some additional contrived signs, as well as borrowings from American Sign Language ( ASL ).

A number of Indigenous Australian sign languages exist, unrelated to Auslan, such as Warlpiri Sign Language.

Australian Sign Language ( Auslan ): An introduction to sign language linguistics.

It uses the same two-handed manual alphabet as BSL ( British Sign Language ) and Auslan ( Australian Sign Language ).

BANZSL, or British, Australian and New Zealand Sign Language, is the language of which British Sign Language ( BSL ), Auslan and New Zealand Sign Language ( NZSL ) may be considered dialects.

The language of education was originally the deaf sign language of Frederick J Rose and his deaf students ; F. J Rose's sign language background was the London dialect of British Sign Language, which would heavily influence the development of Australia's own sign language, Auslan, particularly the southern dialect.

The language contact post secondary education between Australian ISL users and ' Australian BSL ' users accounts for some of the dialectal differences we see between modern BSL and Auslan.

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.

As a result, Auslan users can identify more precise regional varieties ( e. g., " Sydney sign ", " Melbourne sign ", " Perth sign ", " Adelaide sign " and " Brisbane sign ").

Auslan, BSL and NZSL have 82 % of signs identical ( using concepts from a Swadesh list ).

Between Auslan, BSL and NZSL, 82 % of signs are identical ( per Swadesh lists ).

Of those who use Auslan as their main language, only about 5 % learned it from their parents, with the rest acquiring it from peers at school or later in life.

Auslan evolved from sign languages brought to Australia during the nineteenth century from Britain and Ireland.

Auslan is a natural language distinct from spoken or written English.

Most acquire Auslan from deaf peers at school or later through Deaf community networks.

The Deaf community often distinguish 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.

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.

A visual sign taken from a deaf sign language may be generalised to represent homonyms of the English word — for example, the Auslan sign for a ' fly ' ( insect ) may be used in Signed English for the verb ( to ) ' fly '.