This is the something attempts like [International Sign](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Sign) have tried to address. Unsuccessfully.
It turns out that getting all deaf people to use the same sign language is not much easier than to get everyone else one the planet to agree to speak Esperanto.
The problems with getting people to discard what is often their native language for some nebulous benefit of being able to communicate easier with some other people very far away is that people for the most part don’t want to.
Language is culture and the deaf community in many places has been very protective of theirs. (Just look into the controversy about cochlear implants to get an idea of how passionate some people are about those issues.)
It doesn’t help that sign languages aren’t related along the same line as the spoken languages that exist alongside them. American Sign Language, is for example based on French sign Language and rather different from British Sign Language.
Same reason there are variants of spoken language.
Things like BSL (British sign language) and ASL (American Sign Language) evolved after the US had parted ways with the UK but before international telecommunications were invented, so evolved mostly separate. They each have their own, separate, hard fought, histories that I suspect many signers would be unwilling to give up.
As a note – BSL isn’t “British English in sign form”, similarly ASL isn’t American English in sign form either.
Sign languages often/always have a radically different language structure to spoken ones, including things like “spatial grammar” that doesn’t even really exist in spoken languages. In order to learn to read written English (in the case of people in English language countries) signers need to learn a completely new language – English – that is has almost nothing in common with their own.
In the case Black Americans Sign Language, segregation forced African Americans to make their own language (they couldn’t attend deaf schools, which were only for the white until relatively recently). I doubt the BASL community is interested in giving up their rich heritage for an international language that might lack some of the nuance their native signing does.
Why are there different spoken languages? Couldn’t one language become universal and understood by all people?
Questions like this are audist and ableist. I understand you’re not in a position to realize that and it’s not how you intended, but you should be aware that deaf people hear this all the time, and it diminishes their world and their culture. This is like the 20th time I’ve seen it either here or in askreddit, and the hearing population by and large really needs to start accepting that this is not an okay question to ask so publicly.
It’s kind of like saying “why can’t women just learn to drive better?” Would you accept the excuse of someone asking that and saying, “well I don’t see why it’s offensive,” and then say sure, you should just keep asking it in public?
Actually sign language in different cultures are very similar. Sometimes even the same for certain signs. As the deaf culture has grown over the years, the language has changed a lot because some signs/languages were more accommodating to hearing people. Or concepts that only exist to people who know sound or the spoken language.
Some sign languages like “SEE” sign, is a representation of the English language as it is spoken. SEE actually stands for Signing Exact English. And that’s not fair to those that will never know the spoken English language, so why should they have to learn it?
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