ABORIGINAL SIGN LANGUAGE:A STATEMENT

LA MONT WEST

If there is a field of sign language, pantomime anddance analysis in Aboriginal Australia, it is being createdtoday. My own researcll is focused on the grammaticaldescription of Aboriginal sign languages-the orderedassemblages of manual and facial gestures that comprisecomplete language systems co-ordinate with spoken lan­guages in some parts of Australia.

The original impetus for a modern linguistic researchprogramme to rec,ord and analyse sign language came fromthe late Professor A. L. Kroeber of the University of Cali­fornia in Berkeley. Professor C. F. Voegelin of IndianaUniversity arranged for the field work and supervised theanalysis, both performed by myself (1956-7 in America andfrom 1960 on"vards in Australia). Professor Kroeber hopedthat a study of sign langllage ,voJlld lead to a comparison ofan adequately described non-verbal language with verballanguage, and give some insight into general human thoughtprocesses. In addition, Professor Voegelin hopes to applygeneral linguistics techniques to sign language, the world'sonly major non-spoken language system, and thus evaluatelinguistics theory and methodology for 'language' generally,as distinct from only spoken language. The immediatetask, before such high-level theorizing can be indulged, isto provide accurate and detailed descriptions of severalextant sign languages.

Here, I am concerned to state a case for focused researchin the fields of sign language, pantomime and dance inAustralia. Each of these areas is of considerable intereststrllcturally in its own right; and each can yield uniqueinsights into many other aspects of Aboriginal culture. But

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incidental or diffuse study in these domains, ,vithoutspecialized analytical techniques, yields only frustration andcorpora of unmanageable, unpublishable descriptions. Joneshas pointed out during the Conference that only a musicallytrained person can cope with musical and ethnomusicologi­cal transcription. The same is true of sign language, andperhaps more so. My transcriptions of American PlainsIndian and Australian Aboriginal sign languages are theworld's first field transcriptions for any sign language andperhaps will be the last. It is somewhat more complex thanmusical transcription and much less widely known. Indeed,the hole field of. gesture study is slightly understood andhas short future prospects. There will surely be field workfor the next ten or fifteen years in Australia and America,but then we may have seen the demise of all functioningsign languages. There is no time to wait for interest in thesubject to grow and specialists to be trained. The bulk ofthe field work must be performed now and by the fewappropriately trained research workers.

The Volume of the Material

One difference between incidental research and. focusedresearch can be appreciated from the fact that only some1,980 items (mainly lexical) of Australian Aboriginal signlanguage have been noted in the ,,,,hole history of publishedtravellers' reports and ethnographic studies. I know of noorganized reporting of mime in the literature. As for dance,although Spencer and Gilletl, Elkin, Strehlow and theBerndts have recorded quite a mass of material which willbe useful for assessing the potential, no focused work hasyet been done. In addition to published descriptions of signlanguage, there are unpublished field descriptions, but notin sufficient numbers to modify significantly the figure of1,980 available items. By contrast, I have collected andtranscribed in the past twelve months or so 18,895 sign lan­guage items in the field in north-eastern Australia. Abouthalf of these are single lexical items; about half of theremainder are sentence-length texts, and the rest are In

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somewhat longer texts, some ranging up to four or fivepages with 500 signs each. In addition, I have filmed 4,000feet of 16-mm. illustrating some of this material and about400 feet illustrating mimes. I have nothing on paper forthe mimes, but have about two dozen dances fully tran­scribed and 400 feet of film exemplifying some of them.

The terms dance, mime and sign language should perhapsbe more explicitly distinguished here. Within the generalcontext of a 'dance party' or performance, dance movementsare defined as those that are varied or repeated systematic­ally, but only within the structure of the dance. Mimes areexpressive movements that are not repeated systematicallyin or out of the dance situation. Sign language and gestureare movements which are repeated systematically both inand out of the dance or drama situation. Sign language isdistinguished from gesture by all its movements comprisingan overt, recognized linguistic structure, as in the case of aspoken language. Gestures, though conventional, are notexplicitly formulated as a complete linguistic system.

I have said that the history of these studies, as a discipline,starts today. Actually, the preliminary work was started bythe Australian anthropologist Dr Meggitt. In 1954 heapplied a modern analytical technique to the study of signlanguage distribution, in his brief but exemplary statisticaltreatment of lexical material from Roth, Howitt and othersources. He has also coined the term 'finguistics' by whichl'he study will perhaps be known, if it ever achieves thestatus of an independent discipline. At present, linguistsand anthropologists each cheerfully assign sign language tothe other; and no special discipline has emerged to studyexpressive movement in all its forms.

Finguistics and mimetics are different and complementaryareas of research parallel with linguistics and acoustics orsemantics and psychology. Finguistics is a systematic bodyof techniques for analysing the grammatical structure ofmanual sign language-the exact counterpart of linguistics,which analyses spoken language grammar. Mimetics, as astudy of expressive movement, would treat a much broaderrange of bodily activities than sign language and from a

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markedly different point of vie'v. It is likely that forefficiency the student of mimetics ,vould need to treat thefully-analysed results of finguistics study as part of his start­ing data. Just so, psycll010gists take spoken language dataas 'given' and leave grammatical analysis to the linguist.

The Implications of Sign Language and Mime Study forother Disciplines

The conceptualization of their own technology on thepart of Aborigines is beautifully exemplified in their selec­tion of mime and sign language forms to illustrate both

.products and techniques of manufacture. This can form animportant supplement to McCarthy's functional document­ary studies of material culture. It also may provide concretedata which could be compared with verbal descriptions ofthe same activities to broaden the base of psychologicalstudies.

Sign language gives concrete symbolization of a view ofthe world, by the selection of one or another distinctivefeature to represent an object or an animal. This relatesto onomatopceia in spoken language; and it applies to some­thing like ninety-five per cent. of sign language, whereasprobably not more than four or five per cent. of spokenlanguage is onomatopceic. One implication of this is thatlight can be thrown on problems of typology in materialculture. Sign language can give clues as to which featuresare locally regarded as traits in particular objects. This canhelp clear the way for seriation studies in archaeology, suchas have come to the fore in North America recently forareas poor in stratified sites.

Secondly, the conceptual breakdown of categories implicitin sign language structure can be compared with that im­plicit in spoken language. For instance, I have encountereddisparate referent ranges for kin terms in sign and spokenlanguages of the same groups. Such cases might help us tounderstand the relationsilip between the ideal and theoperating structures.

Thirdly, the material of sign language and of dance is

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very closely linked ,vith folk-lore and ethnomusicologicalstudies. I have found it ,vorth ,vhile to turn to corroboreeto get more complete representation in gesture and mimeof mythological subject matter. In some cases, tIle sign lan­guage and pantomime information given in the course of acorroboree exceeds, botil in scope and in specificity, tIlespoken language versions of the corresponding myths andsong texts.

The Uniqueness of Australian Aboriginal Sign Langtlageand Choreograplty

Aboriginal sign language is one of only t,vo indisputablesystems of natural manual sig'n languag'e extant in the ,vorldtoday. The other is tIle Alnerican Plains Indian sign lan­guage. There ,vas an Arlnenian ,vomen's sign langllage untilit ,vas discouraged by the Soviets in the 1930's. There is apartly natural deaf-mute sign language still, ,vhere it has notbeen replaced by lip-reading or manual spelling of ,vrittenlanguage forms. There are very restricted monastic andNeapolitan sign langllages. And there are the extraordin­arily complex Hindu dance mimes, the transcription of,vhich is a Ilig'hly specialized matter.

There is no doubt at all that a specialist is essentialin some areas of the study of culture. EtIlnomusicology iscertainly one of them, and sign language is another. Noreal analysis ,vas practicable before a transcription was avail-

-,' able. Given a ,vritten corpus of sign language data, tIleanalytical metIlodology is identical ,vitil that of linguistics,although the structures of sign languages differ importantlyfrom those of any spoken languages.

Australian Aboriginal choreography attains to a standardof quality nearly unique in the vvorld, especially amongsmall societies. An extraordinarily high degree of choreo­graphic complexity has been achieved, botil ,vith and ,vith­out centralized autilority directing rellearsals and perforrn­ances. TIle Aboriginal ballet traclitioll is perllaps on a par,vith the folk ballets of Russia, South-East Asia, India andIndonesia. It is a priceless Ileritage for Australia, ,vith a

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strona claim for intensive study. But satisfactory transcrip­tion ~nd analysis require techniques as specialized and diffi­cult as those of linguistics.

The Distribution of Sign Language Dialects

There is an interesting distribution of sign languagedialects in Australia, with a fair-sized area of the continentplus the Torres Straits IsI~nds formi~g one group, .an?another bia area of the contInent formIng another. ThIS ISa tentative°assessment. If it proves to be correct, it will sug­gest a modification of the traditional observat~on tha~ in ~he

distribution of cultural traits, the -most ObVIOUS mIgratIonroute into Australia appears to be cut by a discontinuityat Torres Straits, rather than a continuity through to Papua.There is continuity in sign language dialect distributionfrom the Western Desert tp'Torres Straits; and it is perhapsthe only clear instance of a complex of traits with suchcontinuity.

The Urgency of Research

The data for a continent-wide distribution study of dancestyles have yet to be assembled. Aboriginal pantomime anddrama are even less clearly understood. Time is runningout.

Sign language, dance and drama are aspects of culturethat do not .just fade away gradually. They stop suddenly.One day the last performance of a drama is given. No one'knows at first that it was the last performance. There maybe dozens or hundreds of people ,vho could give informa­tion about it from then on until their deaths; but for onereason or another it is never again performed. Wurm haspleaded urgency for linguistic studies ~ince. the la~t peoplewith memory of the languages are dYIng In crUCIal areas.Sian language and dance in most cases disappear beforesp~ken languages, so that the remaining field for researchis narrower still.

The portion of Australia which has bee!,! systematicallysurveyed for sign language by myself to date IS the north-

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eastern fifth, and tilat is abollt tlvo-fifths, at Inost, of whatis available. The lexical survey and dialect distributionstudy, in correlation with tIle apparently relevant socialtraits such as mourning silence, may be' finished in the nearfuture for virtually all of Australia north of the Tropic ofCapricorn. There is further useful material in the southernportion of the Northern Territory, perhaps less farthersouth in \Vestern Australia, still less in Queensland andSouth Australia.

Depth studies in the grammar of sign language have beenstarted in Torres Straits. Intensive work is likely amongthe Walpiri under my present research plans. The crucialareas of Arnhem Land and the Kimberleys are still questionmarks. I hope, too, that it is not too late some,vhere to dothe complete study of one ceremony, one dramatic occasion,as Mountford urges. At this moment in Australia there areknown to be three ethnomusicologists concerned withAboriginal material, a choreographer ,vith knowledge ofLabanotation, and myself concerned with sign language.These are people who can do transcription in the field, soimportant in a satisfactory analytical study. Perhaps a pieceof basic combined field work is not beyond hope.

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