Article cited by academic publication 
This wikipedia page was cited by an article in a current academic journal: Ross E. Mitchell, Travas A. Young, Bellamie Bachleda, Michael A. Karchmer. How Many People Use ASL in the United States? Why Estimates Need Updating. Sign Language Studies 6.3 (2006) 306-335.

The authors discuss the lack of reliable data on the number of ASL users and the widely disparate estimations made on the web (100,000 to 15,000,000). They conclude that no reliable estimate of the number of signers exists, and that most estimates can be traced to two unreliable studies in the 1970s. This wikipedia article, when it was accessed by the author (November 9, 2004), suggested that ASL ranked somewhere between 3rd-most and 10th-most used language in the USA.

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