The project faces numerous obstacles. The first is the scepticism of many of the remaining signers themselves. Hawaii’s tiny deaf community is deeply divided. Some say HSL is not a real language, others see it as backward; still others are sceptical of Lambrecht. But the gravest threat to HSL is American Sign Language (ASL), which is advancing across the globe – from Hawaii to Thailand to Togo – just as fast as English. The deaf world, intensely local until recently, is consolidating and globalising in unprecedented ways. And the forward march of ASL, which in certain ways brings people together, also poses a significant danger to many of the estimated 400 sign languages used all over the world – most of which we know nothing about. Hawaii is a bellwether, but deaf culture all around the world – for many on the inside it is a “capital-D” culture, not a “lower-case-d” disability – faces threats from every direction. The “mainstreaming” of deaf students means that they are placed in hearing schools, where they are encouraged to be just like everyone else but with “special needs”, in a process that some call deliberate assimilation. Cochlear implants (and the potential of gene therapy) even more fundamentally endanger sign languages – some deaf activists condemn such “cures” as being akin to genocide.