Question: What are the three most common sign languages in the world?

List of sign languages

There are perhaps three hundred sign languages in use around the world today. The number is not known with any confidence; new sign languages emerge frequently through creolization and de novo (and occasionally through language planning). In some countries, such as Sri Lanka and Tanzania, each school for the deaf may have a separate language, known only to its students and sometimes denied by the school; on the other hand, countries may share sign languages, although sometimes under different names (Croatian and Serbian, Indian and Pakistani). Deaf sign languages also arise outside educational institutions, especially in village communities with high levels of congenital deafness, but there are significant sign languages developed for the hearing as well, such as the speech-taboo languages used in aboriginal Australia.  Scholars are doing field surveys to identify the world's sign languages.[1][2][3][4]
The following list is grouped into three sections:
Deaf sign languages, which are the preferred languages of Deaf communities around the world; these include village sign languages, shared with the hearing community, and Deaf-community sign languages
Auxiliary sign languages, which are not native languages but sign systems of varying complexity, used alongside spoken languages. Simple gestures are not included, as they do not constitute language.
Signed modes of spoken languages, also known as manually coded languages, which are bridges between signed and spoken languages
The list of deaf sign languages is sorted regionally and alphabetically, and such groupings should not be taken to imply any genetic relationships between these languages (see List of language families).[5]
Sign language list
Contemporary deaf sign languages
Africa
There are at least 25 sign languages in Africa, according to researcher Nobutaka Kamei.[6][7][8] Some have distributions that are completely independent of those of African spoken languages. At least 13 foreign sign languages, mainly from Europe and America, have been introduced to at least 27 African nations; some of the 23 sign languages documented by Kamei have originated with or been influenced by them.

Americas

Asia/Pacific

Europe

Middle East

Historical deaf sign languages
Martha's Vineyard Sign Language
Old French Sign Language – ancestral to the French family
Old Kent Sign Language
Auxiliary sign languages
Australian Aboriginal sign languages (Warlpiri Sign Language, Yolngu Sign Language, etc.)
Baby Sign – using signs to assist early language development in young children.
Contact Sign – a pidgin or contact language between a spoken language and a sign language, e.g. Pidgin Sign English (PSE).
Curwin Hand Signs – a technique which allows musical notes to be communicated through hand signs.
International Sign (previously known as Gestuno) – an auxiliary language used by deaf people in international settings.
Makaton – a system of signed communication used by and with people who have speech, language or learning difficulties.
Mofu-Gudur Sign Language
Monastic sign language
Plains Indian Sign Language
Plateau Sign Language
Signalong – international sign assisted communication techniques used to support children and adults with communication or learning difficulties
Manual modes of spoken languages
For a more extensive list see Manually Coded Language. This page lists only those MCLs with pages on Wikipedia.
General
Cued Speech – a hand/mouth system (HMS) to render spoken language phonemes visually intelligible.
Fingerspelling – alphabetic signs to represent the written form of a spoken language.
English
Manually Coded English
Signing Exact English (SEE2)
Malay
Bahasa Malaysia Kod Tangan (BMKT)
Speech-taboo languages
Caucasian Sign Language
Australian Aboriginal sign languages (though Yolŋu Sign Language does not correspond to any one language, and doubles as a language of the deaf)
Genetic classification of sign languages

Languages are assigned families (implying a genetic relationships between these languages) as British, Swedish (perhaps a branch of BSL), French (with branches ASL (American), Austro-Hungarian, Danish, Italian), German, Japanese, and language isolates.
See also
Contact sign
Intercultural competence
Legal recognition of sign languages
List of sign languages by number of native signers
Manual alphabet
Sign language
World Federation of the Deaf





, directory for all online Sign Languages dictionaries (in French) / (in English)