Auslan Sociolinguistic Variation Corpus

The sign language of the Australian deaf community, Auslan, exhibits significant sociolinguistic variation in its vocabulary and grammar. This project aims to collect linguistic data from a range of deaf signers controlled for gender, age, region, class and social networks, using a recently developed draft sign language assessment instrument. The results will contribute to our theoretical understanding of sociolinguistic variation in the language and will also meet the pressing need for the development of valid and reliable tools for the assessment of grammatical skills in Auslan.
This project was a collaboration between Prof. Trevor Johnston and Dr Adam Schembri.
The collection includes video recordings of participants using Auslan (Australian Sign Language) and associatiated metadata/annotations. The video sessions have been edited (trimmed) into individual clips selected for annotation and annotated using ELAN http://tla.mpi.nl/tools/tla-tools/elan/elan-description/.