Eli5 Why are there different variants of sign language? Couldn’t one form become universal and be understood by all people regardless of language?
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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.
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