Whois & Analysis for deafs.com

Deaf culture is the set of social beliefs, behaviors, art, literary traditions, history, values, and shared institutions of communities that are influenced by deafness and which use sign languages as the main means of communication.

When used as a cultural label especially within the culture, the word deaf is often written with a capital D and referred to as "big D Deaf" in speech and sign.

When used as a label for the audiological condition, it is written with a lower case d.

A sign language (also signed language) is a language which chiefly uses manual communication to convey meaning, as opposed to acoustically conveyed sound patterns.

This can involve simultaneously combining hand shapes, orientation and movement of the hands, arms or body, and facial expressions to express a speaker's thoughts.

Sign languages share many similarities with spoken languages (sometimes called "oral languages"), which depend primarily on sound, and linguists consider both to be types of natural language.

Although there are some significant differences between signed and spoken languages, such as how they use space grammatically, sign languages show the same linguistic properties and use the same language faculty as do spoken languages.

They should not be confused with body language, which is a kind of non-linguistic communication.

American Sign Language (ASL) is a natural language that serves as the predominant sign language of Deaf communities in the United States and most of anglophone Canada.

Besides North America, dialects of ASL and ASL-based creoles are used in many countries around the world, including much of West Africa and parts of Southeast Asia.

ASL is also widely learned as a second language, serving as a lingua franca.

ASL is most closely related to French Sign Language (LSF).

It has been proposed that ASL is a creole language of LSF, although ASL shows features atypical of creole languages, such as agglutinative morphology.

Hearing loss, also known as hearing impairment, is a partial or total inability to hear.

A deaf person has little to no hearing.

Hearing loss may occur in one or both ears.

In children hearing problems can affect the ability to learn spoken language and in adults it can cause work related difficulties.

In some people, particularly older people, hearing loss can result in loneliness.

Hearing loss can be temporary or permanent.

Conversation is a form of interactive, spontaneous communication between two or more people.

Typically, it occurs in spoken communication, as written exchanges are usually not referred to as conversations.