Where does sign language rank among languages used in the world?

Answer 1

"Sign language" is a category of more than 100 different sign languages. Unfortunately, most countries of the world do not recognize their local sign languages, so numbers are not known.

American Sign Language is spoken by approximately 500,000 people in the United States, but worldwide numbers are unknown (it is used in more than 19 countries, and most of them do not recognise or record information about American Sign Language). This places it near the bottom of the world's languages as far as the number of speakers (less than 1%).

We can say that American Sign Language is the most widely spoken sign language in the world, followed by British Sign Language (which is completely unrelated to ASL).

Answer 2

Sign language is considered one of the world's languages, with hundreds of different sign languages used globally. It holds equal importance to spoken languages in terms of communication and expression for deaf and hard of hearing individuals. Sign languages are recognized as official languages in some countries.