Sign Language In Deaf Culture

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At some point in everyone’s life they will have an encounter with someone who can only communicate through the usage of sign language. Sign, also known as American Sign Language (ASL), is a type of a visual language that uses a combination of hand-gestures to communicate, this is more so commonly used by people in the deaf community. In todays modern society, most people do not take too much of a consideration to the deaf culture unless it affects them directly, may it be they know someone who is deaf (e.g. a family member or someone personally close). There is approximately 1,000,000 deaf citizens in the United States and about 8,000,000 citizens who claim to have hard-of-hearing in the United States (Mitchell, web). Even with these numbers, …show more content…
Creating an American Sign Language Immersion and/or ASL programs in schools will help increase the amount of people who can speak ASL but who are not deaf or hard-of-hearing. At the Gallaudet University they offer a program called “JumpStart: ASL” made to teach those who are not to well knowledgeable with sign language and teaches them the basic foundations of the language and about the deaf culture (Smith& Dicus, 204). Creating programs and classes that will teach people ASL will only increase and improve the use of sign language all across the …show more content…
With the population of people who claim to be deaf or hard-of-hearing, about over half of them are over the age of 65 years old (Mitchell, web). The matter of fact is that as individuals become older they tend to lose their hearing, between the ages of 45 and 65 hearing lose tends to occur. “About 6,000,000 people report having "a lot of trouble" hearing with more than half over 65 years of age. Over 28,000,000 people report having "a little trouble" hearing with just less than a third over 65 years of age, but more than half over 45 years of age” (Mitchell, web). In addition, as stated before, children have the cognitive ability to learn new languages a lot easier at their age than when they are grown. So to have the chance to learn a language that will later in life be beneficial is a good chance to take. Just by knowing the basics of the language can come in handy when needing then to rely on it as a new for of communication. There are tons of other beneficial factors people can think of to support the argument to accentuate sign language in todays society; however, knowing that later in life people may end up needing to know the language is a well argument on its own.

American Sign Language should be recognized more by humanity because it is an important language that can be
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