SignWriting List
March 28, 2002
The New York Times reporter had two questions for me...The second was:
2. How many people use SignWriting around the world?
My answer (with some frustration): "I don't know". There are people
who use SignWriting from the internet, and they never introduce
themselves - ha!
And even when they do, there is no way for me to know when they are
using it, and how much, or who else they introduced it too...
The reporter wanted an answer and wouldn't stop asking...so I finally
came up with this:
There are now groups in 27 countries presenting SignWriting to Deaf
populations in different ways...research, literacy education for the
deaf, sign language education for the hearing, Deaf clubs, dictionary
and Bible publishing, computer programming for the deaf...
In Spain, there are 300 people who have learned and are using
SignWriting...If we base 27 countries on "approximately 10 to 300
users" that gives us around 500 to 8,000 users worldwide....depending
on how you look at it...
Here in the US alone we know that the Deaf Church in Michigan has
around 50 to 100 users, and there are four classrooms of deaf
students in Albuquerque, plus the University of Southern Maine'
linguistic studies courses,...then there is North Carolina, and
private students... etc etc
So these two questions from reporters..."how many countries?, and how
many people use SignWriting?" are the most frequently asked...it
seems they want "numbers" and "quantity"...
Any suggestions as to how to handle that in the future?
Val ;-)
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