Sign Language Trivia
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100 free Sign Language trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Sign language is not one language and it is not mime. There are at least 150 distinct signed languages, ASL and BSL are mutually unintelligible, and each has grammar carried as much by the face and torso as by the hands. This quiz covers the linguistics (the five parameters, classifiers, non-manual markers, one- and two-handed alphabets), the history (Bonet's 1620 treatise, Digiti Lingua, l'Épée's Paris school, the Braidwood snub that sent Gallaudet to France, the Milan ban), and the languages themselves: ASL, BSL, Auslan and the BANZSL family, Irish Sign Language, International Sign and its Gestuno past, Plains Indian sign talk, the village signing of Martha's Vineyard and the language Nicaraguan schoolchildren built from scratch. There are questions on legal recognition too, from New Zealand's third official language to Finland's constitution and Papua New Guinea, plus Stokoe, Gallaudet, Deaf President Now, Marlee Matlin and Nyle DiMarco. Easy questions suit anyone learning their first signs; the expert tier covers 17th-century pamphlets and Gestuno's vocabulary count. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on sign language, its individual languages and their histories, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question. For Deaf culture and history more broadly, try our Deaf trivia quiz.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01While hearing babies babble aloud, what did a 1991 study find deaf babies of signing parents doing?
Babbling with their hands
Babbling with their hands: the infants produced meaningless, sign-like hand shapes again and again, a clue that babbling springs from the brain's language capacity and not from the voice.
Q 02Roughly how many distinct sign languages are in use around the world?
200
200 is the right order of size: Ethnologue lists about 150 and the United Nations speaks of more than 300, and nobody knows the true number because many sign languages have never been documented.
Q 03Which two letters of the ASL manual alphabet are traced in the air instead of held still?
J and Z
J and Z are drawn in the air, the little finger hooking a J and the index finger zigzagging a Z; left-handed signers trace both as mirror images.
Q 04More than nine in ten deaf children in the United States are born to which kind of parents?
Hearing parents
Hearing parents: over 90 percent of deaf children are born into hearing families, so many first meet sign language outside the home, at a school or signing programme.
Q 05What is the term for giving a word letter by letter with a manual alphabet?
Fingerspelling
Fingerspelling lets a signer borrow a name or an English word that has no sign of its own, which is why it turns up most with the names of people and places.
Q 06How is the British manual alphabet made, unlike the American one?
With two hands
With two hands, while the American alphabet needs only one, so British and American signers share a written language yet spell it out in completely different ways.
Q 07In the British manual alphabet, how are the vowels represented?
By pointing to the fingertips
By pointing to the fingertips: A, E, I, O and U run from the thumb to the little finger, and Auslan and New Zealand Sign Language, which took over the British alphabet, spell their vowels the same way.
Q 08Who published a pioneering book in Madrid in 1620 on teaching deaf people to speak?
Juan Pablo Bonet
Juan Pablo Bonet built on the methods of earlier Spanish teachers, and the one-handed alphabet printed in his book lives on in the fingerspelling of many sign languages, American Sign Language among them.
Q 09Which Spanish Benedictine monk is credited with the first manual alphabet for teaching deaf pupils?
Pedro Ponce de León
Pedro Ponce de León, a 16th-century Benedictine at the monastery of Oña, taught deaf children of noble families and is credited with the first manual alphabet, adapted from signs used by silent religious orders.
Q 10Which priest, the 'Father of the Deaf', founded the world's first public deaf school in Paris?
Charles-Michel de l'Épée
Charles-Michel de l'Épée opened the school around 1760 after a chance meeting with two deaf sisters, and taught through signs instead of forcing his pupils to speak.
Q 11Modern ASL is most closely related to the signing of which country?
France
France: America's first permanent deaf school opened in 1817 with a deaf teacher recruited from Paris, and his signs blended with those the pupils brought from home to form ASL.
Q 12Which deaf teacher did Thomas Gallaudet bring from Europe to co-found America's first permanent school for deaf children?
Laurent Clerc
Laurent Clerc spent the Atlantic crossing teaching Gallaudet to sign while Gallaudet taught him English, and the Hartford school they opened in 1817 is still running.
Q 13Which 1990 US law requires hospitals and many businesses to provide sign-language interpreters when needed?
Americans with Disabilities Act
Q 21Which common English verb has no everyday equivalent in ASL or Auslan?
To be
To be: signers link a subject straight to its description, so 'my hair is wet' comes out as MY HAIR WET, with nothing standing in for 'is'.
Q 22What was the 1970s forerunner of International Sign called?
Gestuno
Gestuno was a vocabulary of signs chosen by a World Federation of the Deaf committee, but it changed so much in use that the looser signing it grew into is now simply called International Sign.
Q 23In which Italian city was the World Federation of the Deaf founded in 1951?
Rome
Rome hosted the first World Congress of the Deaf, where delegates from 25 national associations set up the federation; the UN now marks its founding date, 23 September, as the International Day of Sign Languages.
Americans with Disabilities Act: it puts the duty to communicate clearly on the provider, so a hospital can no longer simply tell a deaf patient to bring a relative along to interpret.
Q 14Why couldn't Thomas Gallaudet learn to teach deaf pupils in Britain in 1815?
Its schools guarded their methods
Its schools guarded their methods as a family trade secret and wanted payment for every pupil taught, so Gallaudet looked elsewhere in Europe, which is why ASL owes little to British signing.
Q 15In which city did Thomas Braidwood found Britain's first school for deaf children in 1760?
Edinburgh
Edinburgh: Braidwood began in 1760 with a single pupil, a wealthy merchant's deaf son, and later moved the school to London, where his family kept it going after his death.
Q 16Which UK nation passed its own British Sign Language Act in 2015, seven years before Westminster's?
Scotland
Scotland's 2015 Act obliges its ministers to draw up and publish a national plan setting out how public bodies will promote the use and understanding of the language.
Q 17What did the British Sign Language Act 2022 do?
Legally recognised BSL in England, Wales and Scotland
Legally recognised BSL in England, Wales and Scotland: the bill was brought by Rosie Cooper, an MP raised by deaf parents who calls BSL her first language.
Q 18ASL's signs FAMILY and CLASS share a movement and differ only in what?
The handshape
The handshape: FAMILY is made with F hands and CLASS with C hands, the first letter of each English word, a borrowing many Deaf signers regard as English leaking into ASL.
Q 19Auslan is the main sign language of the Deaf community in which country?
Australia
Australia: the name is short for Australian Sign Language, which grew out of the signing that deaf migrants from Britain brought with them in the 1800s.
Q 20Which of these sign languages is more closely related to French Sign Language than to BSL?
Irish (ISL)
Irish (ISL): Dublin's Catholic deaf schools taught boys and girls apart, so for generations Irish men and women signed noticeably different vocabularies.
Q 24New Zealand's 2006 Sign Language Act gave deaf people the right to use NZSL where?
In court
In court: the Act that made NZSL an official language beside Māori created no other new legal right, but it obliges the judge to make sure a skilled interpreter is on hand.
Q 25Which country wrote the rights of sign-language users into its constitution in 1995?
Finland
Finland's 1995 reform said the rights of sign-language users would be secured by law, and twenty years later parliament followed through with a dedicated Sign Language Act.
Q 26Nicaraguan Sign Language emerged spontaneously among deaf children at schools in which city, from 1977?
Managua
Managua: when special-education schools gathered deaf children there from 1977, they pooled their home gestures and within a few years had built a language no adult had taught them.
Q 27As Nicaraguan Sign Language took shape in the 1980s, which signers turned out to use the richest grammar?
The youngest children
The youngest children: each new group that arrived took the older pupils' rough signing and made it more regular, so the language grew richer as its signers got younger.
Q 28Besides its many deaf residents, who commonly signed on 19th-century Martha's Vineyard?
Their hearing neighbours
Their hearing neighbours signed too, so deaf islanders joined fully in work and town life; the deafness itself traced back to settlers from the Weald of Kent.
Q 29Gallaudet University, founded to educate deaf students, sits in which US city?
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C.: the school began in 1856 on land given by Amos Kendall, a former postmaster general who had taken in several deaf children with no one to care for them.
Q 30Plains Indian Sign Language mainly served the Great Plains nations as what?
A lingua franca for trade and diplomacy
A lingua franca for trade and diplomacy: nations with unrelated spoken languages could bargain and negotiate in it, and their deaf members used it as an everyday language.