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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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.
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