Colleges see 16% increase in study of sign language (U.S.)
While the number of American college students studying Spanish, French and German rose only modestly between 2006 and 2009, enrolment in American Sign Language surged by more than 16 per cent, according to a report from the Modern Language Association. ASL is now the fourth most popular language on American campuses.
The report, "Enrollments in Languages Other Than English in United States Institutions of Higher Education, Fall 2009", put total foreign-language enrolment at 1,682,627, an all-time high. Overall growth was 6.6 per cent from 2006 to 2009, down from 12.9 per cent between 2002 and 2006. Language courses still accounted for 8.6 per cent of college classes, exactly the same share as in 2006. In 1965 the figure was 16.5 per cent.
Why students are signing up
Sign-language professors offered several explanations. The most structural is that ASL now counts. A growing number of institutions accept it as satisfying a foreign-language requirement, which turns a curiosity into a credit-bearing option, and requirements are what fill classrooms.
The second reason is employment. ASL is a credential, and not only for people who intend to become interpreters. Cognitive psychologists study it because it is a full natural language expressed in a different modality, which makes it a laboratory for questions about how the brain builds grammar. Educators need it. Nurses need it. So, the professors noted with some amusement, do scuba divers, who work in an environment where speech is not an option.
The point that keeps getting missed
ASL is not English on the hands. It is a distinct language with its own syntax, its own morphology and its own regional variation, historically related to French Sign Language rather than to British Sign Language, which is why a Deaf American and a Deaf Briton often cannot understand one another. Spatial grammar does work that English does with word order and inflection. Facial expression carries grammatical information, not merely emotional colour.
Students who arrive expecting a gestural code for English tend to discover this in about week three, and a good number of them stay anyway. That is part of why the growth is real rather than an artefact of easy credit.
The recession backdrop
All of this happened as universities were cutting. Deep budget reductions during the recession closed language programmes across the country, particularly the less commonly taught ones, and departments were being asked to justify themselves on enrolment numbers alone. Foreign-language enrolment still grew 6.6 per cent, which tells you the demand was coming from students rather than from mandates.
The unflattering number is the share. Language courses are 8.6 per cent of all college classes, unchanged since 2006 and down from 16.5 per cent in 1965. American higher education has almost twice as many students studying languages as it did a generation ago, and they represent half the proportion of the curriculum. Growth in absolute terms, retreat in relative terms.
From classroom to profession
An enrolment surge does not automatically produce interpreters. Certification for sign-language interpreting is demanding, requiring far more than conversational fluency: simultaneous processing, ethical training, familiarity with medical, legal and educational settings, and the stamina to work in pairs with rotation because the cognitive load is punishing. Most students who take two semesters of ASL will never work professionally, in the same way that most students who take two semesters of Spanish will not.
What the surge does produce is a much wider pool of people who can hold a basic conversation with a Deaf colleague, patient or student, and a smaller pool who go on to train properly. Institutions that provide interpreting services have been short of qualified staff for decades, and the shortage is worst in the settings where the stakes are highest: hospitals, courtrooms and mental health services.
A language with a political history
The classroom numbers sit on top of a long fight. ASL was actively suppressed in American deaf education for the best part of a century after the 1880 Milan congress endorsed oralism, and generations of Deaf children were forbidden to sign in school. Deaf culture in the United States is organised around a language that educational authorities spent decades trying to eliminate. Its arrival as the fourth most-studied language on American campuses is not a neutral statistic.
It also creates friction. Some Deaf advocates are uneasy about hearing students treating ASL as a soft option or an exotic elective, and about hearing graduates taking interpreting work without deep community ties. Those arguments run continuously in spaces like r/asl, and they are worth reading before anyone assumes that a 16 per cent enrolment rise is uncomplicated good news.
Who is actually teaching it
The bottleneck is staff. A department that decides to add ASL needs instructors who are fluent, credentialled and preferably Deaf, and the supply of qualified ASL faculty has never kept pace with demand. Programmes have expanded by leaning on adjuncts, on interpreters teaching part-time, and in some cases on hearing instructors with limited community fluency. That is how a language gets diluted in the space of a decade.
The other bottleneck is placement. Introductory ASL fills instantly on most campuses. The third and fourth semesters do not, partly because they are hard and partly because many institutions never built them. Students hit the requirement, satisfy it, and stop. Enrolment charts that measure entry-level seats will always overstate how much of a language is being learned.
What the numbers suggest
American students are not abandoning languages. They are redistributing. The old triumvirate of Spanish, French and German grows slowly, while ASL, Arabic, Korean and Chinese pick up the students who want a language that feels consequential. The institutions that noticed this early built programmes. The ones that did not are still explaining their enrolment figures to a dean.