When we talk about endangered languages, the conversation almost always centres on spoken words — the fading voices of elderly speakers, the unwritten grammars of remote communities, the oral traditions that die when the last fluent speaker passes. But there is a parallel crisis unfolding in silence: the world’s sign languages are disappearing too, and they receive a fraction of the attention. Sign languages are full, natural human languages with their own grammars, histories, and cultural contexts. And like their spoken counterparts, many are under threat.
More Than Gesture: Sign Languages as Complete Linguistic Systems
A common misconception is that sign language is universal — that all deaf people around the world use the same system. In reality, there are over 300 distinct sign languages worldwide, many of which evolved independently within specific communities. American Sign Language (ASL) is not mutually intelligible with British Sign Language (BSL), despite both serving English-speaking populations. Japanese Sign Language bears no relation to spoken Japanese grammar. Each sign language carries its own syntax, morphology, and pragmatic conventions, shaped by the history and culture of the community that uses it.
Beyond national sign languages, dozens of “village sign languages” have emerged in communities with high rates of hereditary deafness. These hyper-local languages are often used by both deaf and hearing members of a community, functioning as shared communication systems rather than disability accommodations. They represent some of the most linguistically unique — and most endangered — languages on Earth.
Adamorobe: A Village Where Everyone Signs
In Adamorobe, an Akan village in eastern Ghana, a hereditary form of deafness has produced a community where sign language is part of everyday life for both deaf and hearing residents. Adamorobe Sign Language (AdaSL) is fully independent from Ghanaian Sign Language and has been used by the community for generations. As of recent surveys, approximately 30 deaf individuals and over 1,300 hearing people use AdaSL, making it one of the rare cases where a sign language is genuinely a community language rather than a minority one.
But AdaSL is now endangered. Deaf children from Adamorobe have increasingly been sent to boarding schools where instruction is conducted in ASL-based Ghanaian Sign Language. As they acquire GSL, their command of AdaSL diminishes. Linguists predict that without intervention, this will lead to complete language shift within a generation — the exact same pattern that threatens spoken indigenous languages when children are educated in a dominant tongue. The irony is stark: a language that survived centuries of isolation is being eroded by the very institutions designed to educate deaf children.
Hong Kong Sign Language: Building a Digital Record
Hong Kong Sign Language (HKSL) faces a different but related challenge. Unlike ASL, which benefits from extensive documentation, dictionaries, and digital resources, HKSL lacks comprehensive and standardised data. Sign languages, by their visual-spatial nature, resist the kind of written documentation that has preserved spoken languages for centuries. There are no ancient HKSL manuscripts, no printed grammars from colonial administrators, no missionary dictionaries.
Professor Youngah Do and her team at the University of Hong Kong are working to change this. They have developed a handshape recognition model trained on HKSL lexical data — an AI system that can identify and catalogue the building blocks of the language. This work represents a crucial step toward creating the kind of comprehensive digital record that could serve as a foundation for language preservation, education, and research. But the project also highlights a fundamental problem: sign languages often lack the written records that make documentation of spoken languages comparatively straightforward.
Technology: Saviour or Threat?
Technology’s relationship with sign language preservation is deeply ambivalent. On one hand, digital video has revolutionised the ability to record, archive, and share sign language materials. Platforms like the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) now accept multimedia collections, allowing researchers and communities to build visual records of endangered sign languages that were previously transmitted only through face-to-face interaction.
On the other hand, some technologies actively threaten the ecosystems in which sign languages thrive. Cochlear implants, which can provide a degree of hearing to some deaf individuals, have been described by members of the Deaf community as a form of “cultural genocide” — not because the technology itself is harmful, but because its widespread adoption reduces the number of people who grow up within Deaf communities, learn sign languages natively, and transmit them to the next generation. Schools for the deaf, historically the primary sites where national sign languages developed and were transmitted, are closing or shifting to oral education models. The institutions that once incubated sign languages are disappearing.
Community-Led Preservation
The most promising preservation efforts are those led by Deaf communities themselves. Organisations like Deaf Development Worldwide (DDW) collaborate with local Deaf leaders to document and revitalise sign languages, recognising that these are not merely communication tools but carriers of cultural identity, artistic expression, and community solidarity. Many smaller Deaf communities use local sign languages rather than widely known ones like ASL, and DDW works to protect these from being absorbed by more dominant sign languages — a dynamic that mirrors the relationship between global and indigenous spoken languages.
The World Federation of the Deaf has increasingly framed sign language preservation as a human rights issue, arguing that linguistic rights extend to visual languages and that Deaf communities have the right to maintain, develop, and transmit their languages across generations. This framing shifts the conversation from charity to justice — from “helping the deaf” to recognising Deaf people as members of linguistic minorities with the same right to cultural continuity as any other community.
Seeing What We’ve Been Missing
The endangered sign language crisis exposes a blind spot in how we think about linguistic diversity. Language preservation discourse overwhelmingly privileges the spoken and written word. Funding bodies, documentation programmes, and public awareness campaigns focus on oral languages, often overlooking the visual-spatial languages that are equally complex, equally ancient, and equally at risk. If the goal of language preservation is to protect the full range of human linguistic expression, then sign languages deserve not just inclusion but prominence in that effort.
Every village sign language that disappears takes with it a unique solution to the fundamental human challenge of communication — a grammar shaped by hands and faces rather than tongues and vocal cords, encoding knowledge and culture in movement rather than sound. These are not lesser languages. They are different languages, and their loss diminishes the human record just as surely as the silencing of any spoken tongue.
