The Long Fight Against Deaf Exclusion

On 18 March 2022 thousands of people from the British Deaf community gathered at Trafalgar Square to support the British Sign Language (BSL) Bill on its third reading in the House of Commons. The BSL Act, which came into law in June, promised momentous change for the approximately 150,000 people who use BSL as their first or preferred language. By giving legal recognition to BSL, the Act ensured that public bodies had a duty to promote and facilitate its use, helping Deaf people to access public services. Of the UK’s minority languages, BSL has the highest number of monolingual users. The Act is also a powerful recognition of Deaf people as a cultural and linguistic group, helping to overturn decades of exclusion. (Deaf with a capital ‘D’ refers to people – most of whom are sign language users – who identify as culturally Deaf, while lower case ‘deaf’ describes people with hearing loss and is generally used in the history of deafness.)