60 Fun Facts About Sign Language

Is signing the same all over the world?

Ethnologue lists about 150 and other atlases over 200; deaf Americans and deaf Britons cannot understand each other's signing.

How many sign languages did the 2021 edition of Ethnologue list?

The SIGN-HUB Atlas counts more than 200 and notes many are still undocumented.

Which is the most widely used sign language in the world, as of 2021?

Ethnologue ranks it the 151st most 'spoken' language on Earth even though it has no official recognition in India, Pakistan or Bangladesh.

Linguists describe signs using five 'parameters'. Which of these is one of them?

The others are orientation, location, movement and non-manual expression such as facial cues.

In signed languages, much of the grammar of a sentence is produced 'non-manually', meaning with what?

ASL and BSL both mark yes/no questions with similar facial expressions.

A slightly open mouth with relaxed tongue means 'carelessly' in ASL. What does a similar expression mean in BSL?

It is a neat example of how non-manual signals are language-specific rather than universal.

What is the term for spelling out a word letter by letter using a manual alphabet?

It is mainly used to borrow words from a spoken language, and can spawn 'initialized' signs based on a word's first letter.

How many hands does the British manual alphabet use?

Auslan and New Zealand Sign Language share the same two-handed alphabet.

In the British two-handed alphabet, how are the vowels represented?

That vowel system survives from 17th-century British 'arthrological' alphabets built on the joints of the fingers.

What was the Latin title of the 1698 pamphlet with the earliest printed two-handed alphabet?

Its anonymous author was himself unable to speak, and suggested the alphabet could also serve for secrecy or entertainment.

Who published the first modern treatise on sign-language phonetics in Madrid in 1620?

Its title translates as 'Reduction of letters and art for teaching mute people to speak'; Ponce de León's earlier alphabet came from monastic signs.

Which Spanish monk developed the first known manual alphabet used in deaf schools?

Silent religious orders had long used signs, which gave him a ready-made vocabulary.

Which priest, the 'Father of the Deaf', founded Paris's first public deaf school in 1760?

He decided on his mission after meeting two deaf sisters signing to each other in a Paris slum.

Two years after l'Épée's death, the National Assembly in Paris gave him what title?

It also declared that deaf people had rights under the Declaration of the Rights of Man.

Modern ASL is most closely related to the signing of which country?

Roughly 58% of ASL signs are cognate with Old French Sign Language, brought over by Laurent Clerc.

Roughly what share of modern ASL signs are cognates of Old French Sign Language signs?

That is below the 80% threshold linguists use to call two varieties dialects, so ASL counts as a separate language.

Reliable estimates put the number of ASL users in the United States in what range?

No accurate census has ever been taken; the figure includes hearing children of deaf adults.

Why is ASL so different from British Sign Language despite the shared spoken language?

Rebuffed in England in 1815, Thomas Gallaudet went to Paris instead and brought back French methods and Laurent Clerc.

In which city did Thomas Braidwood found Britain's first school for deaf children in 1760?

Pupils there were given a fixed 'sign name' instead of a spoken name, a practice still central to Deaf communities.

In what year did the UK government formally recognise BSL as a language in its own right?

Full legal recognition for England, Wales and Scotland came with the British Sign Language Act of 2022.

What did the British Sign Language Act 2022 do?

A GCSE in BSL is still being developed; none was available as of January 2026.

According to the British Deaf Association, roughly how many people in the UK use BSL?

About 87,000 of them are deaf; the estimate excludes professional interpreters.

BSL, Auslan and New Zealand Sign Language are grouped into which language family?

All three descend from 19th-century BSL and share the same two-handed alphabet.

Which signed language is closely related to LSF and ASL rather than BSL, despite being used next door to Britain?

Irish nuns took it to Catholic deaf schools in Australia, where it influenced Auslan.

Auslan is a 'zero-copula' language. What does that mean?

'To be' appears only when an English phrase is quoted and fingerspelled.

What was International Sign formerly called?

The name combined 'gesture' and 'oneness', but when first used at a 1976 congress in Bulgaria deaf delegates found it incomprehensible.

How many signs were listed in the World Federation of the Deaf's 1975 unification vocabulary book?

A World Federation of the Deaf committee had published its standardised vocabulary two years earlier.

International Sign is used mainly at World Federation of the Deaf meetings and which games?

Recent studies call it more complex than a typical pidgin, closer to a full sign language.

NZ Sign Language became New Zealand's third official language in 2006, alongside English and what?

The New Zealand Sign Language Act passed Parliament on 6 April 2006.

Which country wrote sign-language rights into its constitution in August 1995?

Section 17 guarantees the rights of sign users and those needing interpretation.

Papua New Guinean Sign Language became that country's fourth official language in what year?

Its other official languages are English, Tok Pisin and Hiri Motu.

Greek Sign Language gained equal status with Modern Greek in which year?

It had been recognised as an official language in 2000.

Iceland's 2011 law gave Icelandic Sign Language what status?

Family members were given the same right to learn it from the moment deafness is diagnosed.

Nicaraguan Sign Language emerged spontaneously among deaf children at schools in which city, from 1977?

A special-education centre in the San Judas neighbourhood grew from 50 to 100 pupils by 1979, and the children built a language from home signs.

Which MIT linguist did Nicaragua's Ministry of Education contact in 1986 to study the children's signing?

Researchers see the language as evidence that the capacity for grammar is hard-wired in the human brain.

At its 1854 peak, roughly what proportion of Martha's Vineyard residents were deaf?

The US average was one in about 5,730; hereditary deafness on the island traced back to settlers from the Weald of Kent.

In which Martha's Vineyard town was deafness most concentrated, at about one in 25 people?

In one section, Squibnocket, as many as one in four of 60 residents was deaf, and hearing islanders signed too.

Who was the first deaf person known to settle on Martha's Vineyard, arriving in 1694?

He was a carpenter and farmer whose hearing wife came with him; the endogamous community kept the trait alive for 200 years.

Plains Indian Sign Language historically served the Great Plains nations mainly as what?

An 1885 estimate counted over 110,000 'sign-talking Indians' among the Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Sioux, Kiowa and Arapaho.

Which Spanish explorer's 1527 account is among the earliest records of Plains sign talk?

Coronado described it again in 1541; today it remains strongest among the Crow, Cheyenne and Arapaho.

What term describes signing that arises over generations in an insular community with many deaf people?

Examples include Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language in Israel and Adamorobe Sign Language in Ghana.

Which of these sign languages is a known linguistic isolate?

Nicaraguan, Turkish and Armenian Sign Languages are also isolates, unrelated to any other signing family.

Which sign-language writing system, developed by Valerie Sutton in 1974, records facial expression and movement?

HamNoSys, from Hamburg in the 1990s, is a research transcription tool; Stokoe's notation cannot record facial expressions at all.

What term did William Stokoe coin as the sign-language equivalent of phonology?

His 1960 book Sign Language Structure was the first place the term 'American Sign Language' was formally used.

What subject was William Stokoe's PhD in before he revolutionised the study of ASL?

He chaired Gallaudet's English department from 1955 to 1970 after being recruited by a Cornell classmate.

Gallaudet University is officially bilingual in which two languages?

It is the only higher-education institution where all programmes are designed for deaf and hard-of-hearing students.

Which US president signed the 1864 act allowing Gallaudet to grant college degrees?

The collegiate department was first called the National College for the Deaf and Dumb.

The 1880 Milan Conference passed a resolution doing what to sign language in deaf education?

The board formally apologised in 2010 and the resolution was 'fully and unequivocally' renounced in 2025.

Whose remark that 'Deaf people cannot function in a hearing world' helped ignite the 1988 Deaf President Now protest?

Students barricaded Gallaudet's gates with bike locks and hot-wired buses; all four demands were met within a week.

Marlee Matlin, the first deaf performer to win an Oscar, holds what other record in her category?

She won for her screen debut in Children of a Lesser God, one of only four women to win Best Actress for a first film.

Nyle DiMarco graduated from Gallaudet in 2013 with a degree in what?

He went on to win America's Next Top Model and, a year later, Dancing with the Stars.

Which practice involves parents and infants using simple signs before speech develops?

Linguists class it, like home sign and manually coded English, as a system related to but distinct from natural sign languages.

What term covers sign-language constructions showing an object's motion, position or handling?

They are among the most iconic parts of any signed language and are used heavily for spatial description.

One of the earliest written references to signing appears in which dialogue of Plato?

Socrates asks whether, without voice or tongue, we would not 'try to make signs by moving our hands, head, and the rest of our body'.

Which famous signing gorilla had a male companion named Michael who also learned signs?

Linguists stress that the apes learned individual signs rather than a human language as a complete system.

In which country must every cinema release offer a national sign-language video track?

The Brazilian Sign Language (Libras) track plays alongside the film on a second screen.

What basic word order does ASL use, unlike Japanese and Indo-Pakistani signing?

Austrian, Japanese and Indo-Pakistani Sign Languages are subject-object-verb, plausibly influenced by surrounding spoken languages.

George Dalgarno's 1680 'arthrological' alphabet indicated letters by pointing to what?

Some speculate such systems trace back to early Ogham manual alphabets used by hearing people.

In a video relay service (VRS) call, the signer, interpreter and hearing person are in how many places?

In video remote interpreting (VRI), by contrast, the two clients share a room and only the interpreter is remote.

Which Aboriginal Australian signing system is cited as independent of any spoken tongue?

Most Aboriginal sign systems are 'speech-taboo' languages developed by hearing people and used only secondarily by the deaf.