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's just 29 per 100k reported elsewhere in the UK. But there's more... 5/

Multivariate analysis brings together data from different sections of Scotland'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 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