Australian Irish Sign Language: a minority sign language within a larger sign language community.
The Endangered Language Documentation Programme (ELDP) provides grants worldwide to for the linguistic documentation of endangered language and knowledge. Grantees create multimedia collection of endangered languages. These collections are preserved and made freely available through the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) housed at the library of SOAS University of London.
Australian Irish Sign Language (AISL) is a minority sign language within a minority sign language community, brought to Australia from, Ireland in 1875 by a group of Dominican nuns (including a Deaf nun). Three schools used this as a language of instruction, all of which discontinued using AISL in the early 1950s. Most signers are in their early seventies onwards and they number 100 although there may be younger Deaf and hearing native signers who had Deaf parents. The last dictionary was published in 1942.
Primary investigator: Robert Adam
Project Details
Location: Australia, Australia and New Zealand, Oceania
Organiser(s):
Endangered Languages Documentation Programme
Project partner(s): University College London
Funder(s):
Arcadia
Funding received: £4,031.00
Commencement Date: 01/2011
Project Status: Active
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