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Sign Language FAQ What is the ranking of ASL (American Sign Language) as a "Spoken Language"? Research by Lane, Hoffmeister and Bahan suggests in a study, publish in 1996, that ASL ranks after Spanish, Italian, German and French in sequence of highest percentage in use, and if English the most commonly used language is excluded.
The above failure to give a monotropism figure clearly shows the lack of credible statistics because, no census for deaf and hard of hearing in the US exists. As we have discussed in "What percentage of functionally deaf Americans are employed in the US?", hereunder the difficulties in obtaining exact figures are a nightmare and is almost like walking into quicksand. The fact that not only Deaf people make use of ASL, complicates the matter, for we cannot translate statistics derived from health departments (records of born deaf or acquired deafness), as a means to configurate ASL users, as it is suggested, for each deaf person 4 hearing persons (related or friends) will use a sign language in general, but not all these will use ASL. |
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