(Brussels) “It has been estimated that there are 750 thousand deaf people in the EU who use sign language. On average, deaf users of sign language make up about 0.1% of the entire population of a given country. This does not include people who learn sign language as a second language or children of deaf parents”. In the run-up to the European Day of Languages, which falls on 26th September, the EU and the Council of Europe have developed a specific website that provides basic notions about the multiple languages that are spoken and written in the Old Continent. A specific section is about “sign language”, now equated to any other European language. One can find out, for instance, that users of such mode of expression are 5 thousand in Finland, 100 thousand in France. The website http://edl.ecml.at/ – translated into 34 languages – says that not all users of sign language are deaf people. “Children of deaf parents often learn to speak sign language; used by their parents, it is their native language. In addition, the parents and siblings of deaf children learn sign language to ease communication”. Is there a universal sign language? “No, there isn’t. There are many different types – this is the explanation –, and there can be in fact multiple sign languages in a country, as it happens for spoken languages. For example, there are two sign languages in Belgium (French and Flemish) or in Spain (Spanish and Catalan sign languages)”.