The story of HSL raises crucial questions in an age of globalisation: Do cultures on the margins have a future? Will enough people choose to be that different, and will they do it together? Though they parallel spoken languages in certain ways, sign languages represent a fundamentally different way of communicating. They neither derive from, nor correspond to, spoken languages. Nor are all sign languages mutually intelligible, as hearing people often assume – they are as various as spoken languages. Their historical evolution is distinctive. Infants can sign before they can speak, and the great sign language linguist William Stokoe argued that sign may have preceded speech in the history of human language. It’s considered normal for one in a 1,000 children to be born profoundly deaf, but places with higher rates of inherited deafness – such as the village of al-Sayyid in Israel and Bengkala in Bali – have been natural hot spots for sign languages. For sign languages, and for Deaf culture more broadly, inter generational transmission is far from straightforward. The vast majority of deaf adults give birth to hearing children, while most deaf children are born to hearing adults - who have no connection with the Deaf communities.