Can the world’s hearing impaired understand one another?

Sign language developed in a way that’s similar to spoken language but is probably even older. Thus almost every country has its own sign language and some have more than one. Sign language has been used for communication between speakers of mutually unintelligible languages in many of the regions of the world. In Asia for example, the Chinese and Japanese are able to communicate by spelling out on the palm of the hands the characters the two languages share. And some Native American tribes have used a sign language to converse when their spoken languages were too distant to be mutually intelligible. A system that’s sometimes called International Sign Pidgin is used at multinational events and is closer to a full language than most pidgins.

More than 10,000 students and teachers at China’s Changchun University set a new Guinness World Record for most people performing sign language simultaneously to the same song.