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Do you know how many people actually sign in your country? The longstanding shortage of reliable, basic information about the size & shape of signing populations has been a huge problem for those campaigning for rights and recognition. This thread offers answers from Scotland 1/
The @NatRecordsScot census 2011 asked “Do you use a language other than English at home?” 12,533 respondents replied by ticking the box marked ‘Yes, British Sign Language’. Signers live throughout Scotland’s 32 Local Authorities (including Outer Hebrides, Shetland & Orkney). 2/
That’s approximately one #BSL signer to every 400 members of the whole national population. If you scale that up to UK population size, the same ratio would give a figure for these isles of some 140,000 BSL signers. #BSLEnlightenment 3/
Against an estimate of 7.7 billion inhabitants of planet Earth today, one might predict a global signing community of over 17 million people – comparable to the population of Chile, for example, or the Netherlands.
The 2011 census for England and Wales asked a different question & found that just 15,487 respondents were recorded as ‘mainly’ BSL signers. So in contrast to 245 signers per 100k citizens for Scotland, that& #39;s just 29 per 100k reported elsewhere in the UK. But there& #39;s more... 5/
Multivariate analysis brings together data from different sections of Scotland& #39;s census, so we can ‘overlay’ language data against information on ‘long-term health conditions’ (eg deafness). On this basis, precisely 3729 people aged 3+ were identified as both deaf & using BSL. 6/
Estimates of the size of the signing deaf population have been bandied about for generations: none has ever been considered reliable as an indicator at the whole-population level. Applying the Scottish analysis to the UK as a whole predicts ~40,000 deaf BSL signers (aged 3+) 7/
Including all age groups, 3871 members of the entire 2011 Scottish population of 5,313,600 could be expected to be deaf BSL signers. Extrapolated to a 2011 population of 63,182,000, this would equate to 46,028 deaf BSL signers of all ages in the UK as a whole. 8/
Indications are that these may be underestimates. The census questions are open to interpretation; health conditions data are understood to generate questionable numbers; not all signers in Scotland consider themselves BSL users. This is explored in: https://www.abdn.ac.uk/pfrlsu/documents/Ch3_Turner.pdf">https://www.abdn.ac.uk/pfrlsu/do... 9/
Taking into account adjustments relating to the above factors, an estimated figure of 6,500 deaf signers in Scotland & correspondingly some 70,000 across the UK, may be seen as realistic. New census data will be gathered in the 2020s. Meantime, BSL is alive, well & vital. 10/10
