Tradition and innovation: Using sign language in a Gurindji community in Northern Australia

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.