FAQ: American Sign Language: Ranking & Number of "Speakers"

American Sign Language (ASL) is commonly said to be "the fourth most-used language in the United States" (alternatively phrased as "the third most-used non-English language in the U.S."). This claim has been around since the early 1970s. We have seen an assertion that this comes from research done for the Bilingual Courts Act of 1974, which supposedly established that ASL was the fourth most-used language in the U.S. However, we have been unable to locate this research, or any citation to it, for verification.

In any case, the relative rankings of languages decades ago are not necessarily the same as the rankings after the beginning of the 21st Century. Harlan Lane, Robert Hoffmeister, and Ben Bahan say, in A journey into the deaf-world (San Diego, Calif.: DawnSignPress, 1996, p.42):

In other words, according to Lane, Hoffmeister and Bahan, ASL is currently the sixth most-used language in the U.S., or the fifth most-used non-Englishlanguage in the U.S.

However, depending on the figures and data chosen, other interpretations yield other rankings. For example, consider these figures for "Non-English Language Speaking Americans, 2000", extracted from the 2004 Time Almanac (for languages "spoken at home" and also supplied by the Census Bureau, which ignored ASL when surveying languages):

Using the high figure of 2,000,000 users of ASL, it would place third on this list, behind Spanish and Chinese. On the other hand, using the low figure of 500,000, ASL would fall to 12th place on this list, behind Portuguese and ahead of French Creole. Intermediate estimates for ASL obviously will produce intermediate ranking results.

To add to the confusion, in its article on American Sign Language this almanac repeats the common assertion that ASL "is the fourth most used language in the United States today." Using the list above, this would imply an ASL-using population greater than 1,643,838 but less than 2,022,143 users (between Chinese and French). However, there simply is no firm basis for this or any other estimate.

Dr. Thomas E. Allen, of the Gallaudet Research Institute, wrote a one-page 1994 paper on the difficulties of estimating how many people use ASL. It is available on the Internet at http://gri.gallaudet.edu/Demographics/qxreasl.html.