https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9509-1547
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ABSTRACT
In the Gurindji community of Kalkaringi in Northern Australia the shared practices of everyday communication employed by both hearing and deaf members of the community include conventionalized manual actions from the lexicon of Indigenous sign as well as some recent visual practices derived from contact with both written English and with Auslan. We consider some dimensions of these multimodal practices, including kinship signs and signs for time-reference, and discuss several notable features in these domains. The first is gender-motivated use of the left and right sides of the body in several kinship signs. The second is the use of celestial anchoring in some signs for time. The use of spatially accurate pointing also contributes to the indexical richness of these communicative practices, as do some introduced semiotic resources, such as air-writing, and Auslan fingerspelling. As the first description of Gurindji sign, we establish a basis for further understandings of how tradition and innovation are incorporated into these shared practices.
Acknowledgements
We acknowledge and thank the many speakers and signers at Kalkaringi with whom we have worked on the sign project, and in particular Cedrina Algy, Jeffrey Barry, Junior Berd, Helma Bernard, Nigel Bernard, Lucy Dodd, Gladys Farquharson, Ros Farquharson, Gus George, Karen Hector, Tara Long, Georgina King, Norman Oscar, Antara Patrick, Rosita Rose, Jordan Smiler, Lisa Smiler, Samantha Smiler and Joanne Stevens. We also thank our cultural advisors Violet Wadrill, Topsy Dodd, Ronnie Wavehill and Kathleen Sambo. We thank the Karungkarni Art and Culture Aboriginal Corporation, and in particular the manager, Penny Smith. Jessica Bell, Gabrielle Hodge, Eleanor Jorgensen, Lauren Reed and Wanyima Wighton assisted with the annotation of the corpus in Elan. We especially thank Gabrielle Hodge for her insightful comments on an early version of this article, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on the final draft. This research has been approved by the University of Melbourne Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC no: 1646778.1).
Data availability statement
The data that support the findings of this study are archived at AIATSIS (https://aiatsis.gov.au/collection/search-collection) and are available subject to individual access conditions. Relevant archival session names are indicated in the article. Examples of Gurindji sign cited in this article can also be found at https://iltyemiltyem.com/.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 In the Australian context ‘Indigenous’ is a general term that covers both Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. It is conventionally capitalized. See https://aiatsis.gov.au/explore/australias-first-peoples (accessed 3 May 2022).
2 Alternate sign languages are referred to as secondary sign languages by some (e.g. Pfau, Citation2012, pp. 528–551).
3 The Gurindji word for ‘hand’ wartan is not used to describe the sign language used there. Takataka is recognised as a Gurindji word (Meakins et al., Citation2013, p. 353).
4 See https://bushtel.nt.gov.au/profile/591, https://bushtel.nt.gov.au/profile/603 (accessed 3 May 2022).
5 There is an additional hour of sign recorded in 1976 by Kim McKenzie and Patrick McConvell with Albert Crowson Lalka and Sambo Crowson, two Mudburra brothers from Montejinnie Station who were at Daguragu because the Montejinnie stock workers were on strike at the time (Gurindji-V0724_1_avc.mp4).
6 Some laboratory-based paradigms for delivering these tasks obscure the responses of participants by delivering the stimuli on iPads – the director does not observe the matcher's guess and the guess is not evaluated on the spot (see Macuch Silva et al., Citation2020). This method was not suitable in our field context.
7 Kendon's recordings of Jingulu and Mudburra sign made at Elliott in 1984 provide a point of comparison. He recorded 353 ‘unitary’ Mudburra sign forms, and 287 Jingulu ones (Kendon, Citation2013[1988], p. 112).
8 See http://batchelorpress.com/node/373 (accessed 18 February 2020).
9 The films won the 2019 ICTV Video Award for Best Language Film; see https://ictv.com.au/languages/gurindji (accessed 18 February 2020).
10 See https://iltyemiltyem.com/ (accessed 3 May 2022).
11 While the phenomenon of using both sign and speech is often referred to as ‘bimodal bilingualism’, we prefer to enlist the term ‘multi’ as many Gurindji people speak a number of spoken languages.
12 A multilingual conversation that occurred around the killing and butchering of a bullock in the 1970s led to the identification of Gurindji-Kriol code-switching as an unmarked communicative practice and the linguistic source of the mixed language, Gurindji Kriol (Meakins, Citation2011a).
13 ‘Sorry business’ refers to a constellation of practices associated with bereavement, where appropriate kin will travel, sometimes over large distances, to express their condolences to kinsfolk. Often a special temporary ‘sorry camp’ is established at some distance from everyday residences.
14 Helma Bernard, personal communication to authors, 27 February 2020.
15 In this instance both interlocuters are hearing. It is not clear how to interpret the action of the left hand. It may be a stroke held from a previous sign in a multi-sign utterance. It could be an open palm gesture, in this case adding interrogative weight to the what sign (Cooperrider et al., Citation2018).
16 These percentages are lower than estimates of rates of deafness in some rural signing communities elsewhere in the world. For example, Nyst estimated that deaf people constitute 2% of the population where Adamarobe Sign Language is used (Nyst, Citation2007, p. 25), compared to an estimated 2.2% of the population where Kata Kolok is used in the village of Bengkala in Bali (de Vos, Citation2012, p. 22).
17 For an overview of Australian Indigenous spoken-language terminologies and an introduction to some conceptual principles that underpin the kinship systems, see http://www.austkin.net/index.php (accessed 3 May 2022).
18 The only other reported Australian Indigenous sign language kin sign that articulates to the nose is a Ngatajara [Ngaatjatjarra] sign for father (Kendon, Citation2013[1988], p. 348). We note that in Ngaatjatjarra, pointing to the nose indicates the 1st person pronoun.
19 Archival session: SIGN-20180607-03.
20 In Balgo the sides of the body are also reported to be gendered (male = right, female = left). Tom Ennever, personal communication to Felicity Meakins, 30 March 2020.
21 Abbreviations: dat dative; nmlz nominalizer.
22 Another word for ‘right-handed’ is jutungarrka and other terms for ‘left-handed’ are wartiwarti, wirlkirri and jirrpintikarra. Note that jutu also means ‘correct, straight’ (Meakins et al., Citation2013, p. 122).
23 See https://auslan.org.au/dictionary/words/sister-1.html (accessed 4 May 2022).
24 See https://auslan.org.au/dictionary/words/man-1.html (accessed 4 May 2022).
25 See https://auslan.org.au/dictionary/words/boy-1.html (accessed 4 May 2022).
26 Demonstrated by Clifton Bieundurry; see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLwf2b4kWKo (accessed 3 May 2022).
27 See http://www.auslan.org.au/dictionary/words/time-1.html (accessed 3 May 2022).
28 Archival session: SIGN-20180607-01 (Sign20180607-01.mov).
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Notes on contributors
Jennifer Green
Jennifer Green is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Languages and Linguistics at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Her research interests include Australian Indigenous languages, verbal arts, gesture and multimodality, lexicography, field methods, archiving, and research ethics. For over 40 years she has collaborated with Indigenous peoples in Central and Northern Australia on projects documenting spoken and signed languages, cultural history, and visual arts. She has published widely on these topics.
Felicity Meakins
Felicity Meakins is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Queensland and a CI in the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language. She is a field linguist who specializes in the documentation of Australian Indigenous languages in Northern Australia. She has worked as a community linguist as well as an academic over the past 20 years, facilitating language revitalization programmes, consulting on Native Title claims and conducting research into Indigenous languages. She has compiled a number of dictionaries and grammars of traditional Indigenous languages and has written numerous papers on language change in Australia.
Cassandra Algy
Cassandra Algy is a Gurindji woman and a Research Assistant at the University of Queensland who has worked on a number of Gurindji and Gurindji Kriol research projects over the last 15 years, including the Aboriginal Child Language (ACLA) project, the Gurindji History project, the Gurindji sign language project, the Gurindji songs project and the Gurindji ethnobiology poster project. Algy also works at Karungkarni Art and Culture Aboriginal Corporation at Kalkaringi as an art worker.