Welcome to Auslan Signbank

Auslan Signbank is a language resources site for Auslan (Australian Sign Language). Auslan is the language of the deaf community in Australia. Here you will find:

a dictionary

ability to search for signs related to medical and health topics

ability to search for signs related to educational and teaching topics

videos of deaf people using the listed Auslan signs

information on the deaf community in Australia

links to Auslan classes

Users of Auslan—deaf people, deaf students, sign language interpreters, students of Auslan, or a parents of deaf children—are invited to provide feedback to help improve the dictionary, using the links provided. Auslan is growing and changing all the time.

We apologise for the poor quality of some of the video clips and the slow download speeds currently found in Auslan Signbank.

However, with the financial support of the AMP Tomorrow Fund, the Ian Potter Foundation, the Australian Research Council we have been able to replace many of the poor quality videos with higher resolution ones. They can now also be viewed at normal speed or in slow motion. In addition, many new videos have also been added to Signbank by deafConnectEd (Melbourne Polytechnic) with funding from the Victorian Government Department of Education and Training. They have also added new entries with definitions in Auslan of specialised English educational terminology, and in some cases they have also added suggestions for how these terms could be represented using a short signed description.

We also hope to include on this site video clips of all of the examples used in the text-book on Auslan, e.g., how to make questions, statements, orders and requests, etc., (Johnston, T., & Schembri, A. 2007. Australian Sign Language (Auslan): An introduction to sign language linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).









