American Sign Language - Population

Population

The number of ASL speakers is unknown. Determining the number of people who use ASL is difficult because, unlike most oral languages, ASL use is not associated with a specific ethnicity, location, or even household. Rather, people learn ASL because they are deaf, hearing impaired or, less commonly, speech impaired, or because they have family or friends who sign. Further, most deaf children are born to hearing adults and thus learn ASL mainly at school, rather than from their parents, so it is often not the language of the home.

ASL is frequently, though incorrectly, cited as the fourth- or fifth-most-spoken language in the United States. These figures misquote a 1972 survey that actually concluded that ASL speakers constituted the fourth-largest population requiring an interpreter in court. Several other languages were more widely spoken, but many of their speakers were bilingual in English. The survey only questioned deaf people on whether they signed "well", it did not distinguish ASL from other sign languages, and it did not investigate how many hearing people among their friends and family, such as their children, might also sign.

From that incomplete 1972 data, it was extrapolated that there were at most 500,000 home speakers, both deaf and hearing, in the United States at the time, with an unknown percentage being ASL speakers. There has been no reliable estimate since the 1972 study. The US population has also grown by 50% in the roughly 40 years since 1972, and education for the deaf, including access to ASL, has greatly improved. In addition, the number of profoundly deaf people in the country (approx. 2.5 million in the year 2000), a figure commonly given as the upper bound in ASL estimates, cannot be used, as the majority (roughly 75%) of these people became deaf after age 65 and are unlikely to use ASL well, if at all.