> that's just the nature of having more than one language in use Well, yeah. I guess my point is that ASL is pretty much a foreign language. I'd compare it to

> that's just the nature of having more than one language in use Well, yeah. I guess my point is that ASL is pretty much a foreign language. I'd compare it to the situation with the english language worldwide - since english is the lingua franca, so to speak, many countries around the world teach it as a second language. If you don't learn english, then (generally speaking) you're at a disadvantage because you can only communicate with a subset of your population. I'm not saying there's a problem with deaf people, any more than there's a problem with anyone else who simply doesn't happen to know the languages of some of the people around them.