Sign Language, Endangered

A recent increase in work related to village sign languages has greatly expanded our knowledge about the types of sign language that exist, how they are maintained in small communities, and how they are being lost. This entry focuses on very fundamental issues in sign language endangerment, including (1) how many sign languages there are, (2) how many people use these languages, and (3) how endangerment affects these languages.

The issue of language endangerment and language loss in general is the most pressing issue facing not only linguists but also society as a whole. The loss of a language means the loss of an immeasurable amount of information. Several sources have proposed estimates predicting the percentage of languages that will be lost in the near future. These range from a loss of 90 percent of the world’s languages to the more conservative estimate of 50 percent. The Endangered Languages Project, an online resource that provides information on endangered languages, lists just more than 3,200 languages that are at risk of being lost. This more recent research agrees with the more conservative estimate that 50 percent of the world’s languages are at risk. These numbers highlight the immensity of the problem, but astonishingly the literature on sign language endangerment is essentially nonexistent. This poses a serious threat to the future of endangered sign languages. Linguists and the general population have become increasingly aware of the threat of spoken language loss, but the issue of sign language loss has only very recently received a comparable amount of attention.

There are many resources available for the an estimate of number of languages in the world, and most estimate around 7,000. References for number of sign languages are much less readily available. As of 2014, Ethnologue lists 136 sign languages. Considering the amount of work still to be done, this number is likely on the conservative side. The Endangered Languages Project lists 71 endangered sign languages, but this number is very likely to be revised upward as the project is currently revamping its sign language data. At the very least, sign languages are just as at risk as spoken languages, but the issue is not so clear-cut. There are likely numerous sign languages that do not appear in these calculations. In her grammar of Mavea, a spoken language in Vanuatu, Valérie Guérin notes that two deaf children who were born in this community of just more than 200 people had developed a sign language that other members of the community now use. Needless to say, no documentation has been done on this new [Page 781]language, and situations that parallel the Mavea case are likely plentiful.

The best-known sign languages are used by more than 100,000 (e.g., ASL) while smaller village sign languages may be signed fluently by fewer than 100. The average number of signers for each language is certainly much lower. For comparison, Cambodian Sign Language, although signed throughout Cambodia, is used by as few as 7,000 people. Kata Kolok, a village sign language of Bali, has 47 Deaf signers and 78 hearing signers listed as “fluent.” These numbers more accurately reflect the status of sign languages around the world.

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