Proudly two-handed in Oz!

[Richard Arnold]

Adam,

 I know that already. I'm sorry to imply that all of the Deaf in Aussie are
using the one-handed alphabet. Nevertheless, I have read that it is spreading
in some schools of the Deaf (which ones I forgot). But I don't think the
majority of Deaf are switching their fingerspelling alphabets. It may in fact
be restricted to the younger generation.

 A Deaf friend of mine here in LA told me of a Deaf woman from Oz who is now
in Gallaudet, he kind of told me that she was planning to learn ASL in order
to develop "better" signs for a Deaf school !! That really concerned me very
much. As Auslan is already a highly developed signed language and there is no
need of such attempts to bring in ASL signs (unless they are incorporated by
the natural interaction between the US Deaf and Aussie Deaf communities).

 But you are right about some American loan signs that have been incorporated
by Deaf into Auslan. This is perfectly natural. Most of the American signs
that were loans sign most probably came through contact with the Deaf
community in Australia, rather than directly from the USA (there is of course
no way to know for sure). there also a number of new signs from BSL in Kiwi
Sign, not to mention some from Finnish and Russian sign language from the few
deaf immigrants (see Ahlgren's thesis -- I think that's where I got this from
).

 My main concern is that some sign language linguist from the US may have a
tendency to favor ASL over local signed languages without considering the the
wishes of the local Deaf community or the differences in culture (this has
happened in some Central American countries). There is this pervasive naivety
among Americans in general (not all of course as some are well informed) about
other cultures and languages, and often they assume that their way is the only
and best way to do things. In fact there is a need to educate American Deaf
about other sign languages and the need to respect these languages and not to
insist on their language as being better than others. Unfortunately, this is
difficult to do. A few times I try to explain that ASL is not "English Sign",
but they just don't get it.

 Ah well, it's not a perfect world, eh?

 Thanks for your dialogue.

 Richard A.

Pardon me for using 'Americanized' instead of 'Americanised' I been here for
too long, and I miss the rugby... I have to use the American spelling for
certain words in my work so as not to confuse my colleagues...nuts...