Eli5: Why do people use sign language rather than grabbing a pen and paper to write down what they want to say?

Question

Why use sign language, wouldn’t it have been easier to use a pen and paper rather then having to learn how to sign?

In: 0

Answer 1

For the same reason that hearing people don’t just write what they want to communicate and show it to people: because it’s slower and requires special tools. Now, many deaf people have an app on their phone that they can use to type something out in a large font that makes things easy to read when communicating with hearing people, but that’s exclusively for communicating with hearing people. When they can use sign language, they will, because it’s faster and a much richer and communicative language.