The Deaf World
in Numbers

Share of people with any degree of deafness by age group, globally. The sharp increase after age 50 reflects the dominant role of age-related deafness.

Age-standardised prevalence of deafness by sex globally. Men are consistently more across all age groups, according to experts, probably due to greater occupational and recreational noise exposure.

24 million people use a sign language as their first language. This refers to native signers who acquired a sign language as their primary language. The number including second-language users is significantly higher.

Indo-Pakistani Sign Language (IPSL) is used by an estimated 15 million deaf people across India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal.

🧏 and 🦻 were proposed by Apple in collaboration with the National Association of the Deaf (NAD, USA) and approved in Unicode 12.0 in 2019 — the first emojis specifically designed for the deaf community. 🤟 had already existed since Unicode 10.0 (2017), adopted by the deaf community as the ASL sign for “I Love You” (read more here).

Native signers only. Data from Ethnologue. Numbers are estimates and vary across sources.

On 19 July 2010, the 21st International Congress on the Education of the Deaf (ICED) in Vancouver, Canada, formally rejected all resolutions passed at the 1880 Milan Congress. The declaration, entitled “A New Era: Deaf Participation and Collaboration”, acknowledged with regret the detrimental effects of the ban and called upon all nations to accept and respect all languages and forms of communication in deaf education. It took 130 years.

Picture books, comics, graphic novels and YA fiction — deaf characters have been quietly shaping children’s reading for decades. Representation in children’s literature is far broader than most people realise.

The world's oldest manga including sign language illustrations was published in 1991. Wagayubi no Orchestra tells the story of Takahashi Kiyoshi (高橋潔), a pioneer of deaf education in Japan.

The first Deaflympics were held in Paris in 1924 — the first ever international sporting event for athletes with a disability, predating the Paralympics by decades.

From 148 athletes in 9 countries to over 3,000 in more than 100 nations — a hundredfold expansion of the deaf sports movement in a single century.

209 events across 21 disciplines. 2,911 athletes from 79 nations at the 25th Summer Deaflympics in Tokyo, November 2025.

34 finals. ~700 athletes from 34 nations at the 20th Winter Deaflympics in Erzurum, Turkey, March 2024. Futsal and Chess made their debut at this edition.

September 23rd every year. Proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in 2017.

Politicians across history and the world who were deaf or hard of hearing, documented by Wikipedia. A growing presence — deaf people are increasingly reaching positions of political representation worldwide.

Model, actor and deaf activist. Winner of America’s Next Top Model (Cycle 22) and Dancing with the Stars (Season 22). Founder of the Nyle DiMarco Foundation.

A common assumption is that sign languages are transmitted from deaf parents to their deaf children. However, in reality, 90–95% of deaf children are born to hearing parents, and only an estimated 2–10% are exposed to a sign language from birth within the family. Therefore, most deaf individuals who use sign language acquire it outside the home, through peers, schools, and the Deaf community. *Caveat: global data does not exist. The 70–95% range is an estimate derived from multiple studies; the real figure is unknown but certainly high.

Emerson Romero, a deaf Cuban-American actor, developed the first captioning for a movie in 1947, splicing film strips and inserting images with captions between picture frames. Today, subtitles are used by the majority of streaming viewers for reasons unrelated to deafness. *Caveat: the 80% figure varies between 69% and 85% across studies. No single global survey exists.

Our chart in the Education section tracks ~8,000 publications in five specialist sign language journals since 1972. But sign language research also appears in hundreds of journals. Extrapolating from CrossRef data suggests a total of 30,000 to 40,000 peer-reviewed papers globally. *Caveat: this is a very rough estimate.

The ICSD does not publish a cumulative total. This estimate is based on known participation figures per edition — from 148 athletes in Paris 1924 to 3,000+ in Tokyo 2025 — extrapolated across all 25 Summer editions. *Caveat: this number was calculated by us, not published by any official body. The real figure could be anywhere between 40,000 and 65,000.

95% of deaf marriages involve two deaf partners — one of the highest rates of community endogamy of any linguistic minority in the world. It reflects the depth of social bonds formed through shared language and culture. *Caveat: this figure comes from US research and is widely cited but global data does not exist. Other studies, also from the US, reported between 72.5% and 90% of marriages among deaf couples being endogamous.

High blood pressure was almost twice as common in deaf people as in the rest of the population (37% vs 21%) and has not been diagnosed. The cause is not lifestyle — deaf people in this study smoked less and drank less alcohol than the general population. The gap is attributed to information and communication barriers in healthcare. *Caveat: largest study of its kind but limited to the UK (298 clinical assessments).

Distinct nationalities among the deaf people documented — calculated live.

Statistical estimate based on published content across nine Unusualverse and Excepcionales sites. Equivalent to approximately — novels. Sites: Unusualverse, Signs Unusualverse, Academia Unusualverse, Shorts Unusualverse, Excepcionales, Escuelas Excepcionales, Signos Excepcionales, Cortos Excepcionales, Excepcionales Kids.