How many people speak sign languages?

Answer 1

Sign language is not universal. There are hundreds of different sign languages. Many different countries have their own sign languages, with linguistic conventions and gesture-meaning vocabularies that vary from other nations' sign languages.

Some examples of sign languages are:

• American Sign Language (ASL - 500,000 to 2,000,000 signers in the United States in addition to others abroad)
• British Sign Language (BSL - over 50,000 first-language signers)
• French Sign Language (LSF - 80,000 to 300,000 signers)
• International Sign Language (also known as International Sign Pidgin, Gestuno, or ISL)

Some nations even have multiple sign languages. For example, in Japan, there are three main sign languages: Japanese Sign Language, JSL, which is generally used by native speakers and involves mouthing syllables in addition to finger spelling; Pidgin Signed Japanese, which is used between generally non-native speakers with native speakers, and Manually Signed Japanese, which translates the written form of Japanese into gestures.

As one can observe from the statistics above, the number of people who sign using even a nation's own sign language is hard to determine accurately. Statistics for many areas of the world are unavailable.

Thus it is hard to definitively say for the world, or even a nation, how many people use a sign language. However, one can infer from the statistics for the individual nations above a general sense of how many sign language users there are in the world. However, these numbers should not be seen as accurate and representative of the proportion of sign language users to total population world-wide, only as a rough estimate.

According to Wycliffe Translation Organization- they stated that there are over 400 forms of sign language across the globe. And many of them are not very well known. They can be similar to ASL or oral sign language.

Answer 2

It's not possible to know the numbers for every country, because most countries do not collect this information. There is information from some countries though, including the following:

• American Sign Language is the most widely spoken sign language in the world. It estimated to be spoken by between 250,000 and 500,000 native speakers in the United States.
  
• British Sign Language (unrelated to ASL) has between 77,000 and 250,000 native speakers.
  
• Danish Sign Language has about 5000 speakers.
  
• French Sign Language has about 100,000 speakers.
• Israeli Sign Language has about 10,000 speakers.
• Mexican Sign Language has about 130,000 speakers.
• Russian Sign Language has about 120,000 speakers, according to a 2010 census.
  

Answer 3

It is estimated that around 70 million people worldwide use sign languages as their primary means of communication. This includes users of various sign languages such as American Sign Language (ASL), British Sign Language (BSL), and others.