ASL is theoretically great, but the “deaf subculture” is awful and tarnishes it by association. I’m sorry, but missing one of the five senses is a disability. It’s great that they manage to work around it so well, but no one that’s deaf should be seriously arguing that a hypothetical medical procedure to give them hearing would make their life worse, or qualify as some sort of cultural genocide.

It's evolved (mainly) from french sign language, so calling it great is a stretch. Much prefer the BANZSL sign language family.

But yeah they're retarded and reaching hard. We should teach kids a difficult (lvl 4 or 5) language, invest hundreds of their hours each, so they can do what, chat when they're scuba diving and not be ablist?

In the same amount of time, at the same level of proficiency, you could teach em french, italian, spanish, and maybe german too. I don't mean one of those. I mean all 4 in the time it takes to teach ASL. The romance languages are lvl 1, and german is 1.5 or 2. And that would also be a waste of time. Let the french learn english.