system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV: English and North American countries should teach sign language as a compulsory second language.

European and North American countries should stop compulsory teaching of a second spoken language in schools\*, and should instead teach **one** **common****^(3)** sign language (maybe ASL, but an alternative would be a language designed from the bottom up to be easy to learn).    Advantages would be:

\- It would get used regularly by everyone in situations where spoken languages caused problems (crowded bar, across a crowd, in a library, talking to grandad when he's forgotten his hearing aid, foreign travel, communicating with people who are completely deaf\*\*).

\- As a result enough people would be good enough at it that it COULD be used for international communication.

\- If the above countries started it, almost certainly other countries (at least those with significant trade or tourism links with them) would follow - it would be a lot easier to learn than the current option!

\- Europe rather needs a new lingua Franca (and yes, I do love the irony that it almost certainly won't be French!) unless it wants to give the UK the satisfaction of continuing to use English (although there are of course benefits to the current generation of diplomats of continuing with the status quo)

Disadvantages would be:

\- Foreign language teachers needing to retrain.

\- Possibly slower verbal development in kids if their parents don't prioritize verbal communication even when sign language is more efficient.

\- Less demand for the skills of those who can already speak foreign languages (although I'm not sure this would actually be a big issue given older generations would likely be slower to pick up the new language).

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\*I'm not saying don't teach other foreign languages at all and there might be exceptions where you'd want to make one compulsory (I imagine teaching Spanish to Californians would make sense, for instance) but it makes sense to me to let (eg) UK kids take French as an option the way they would German or Spanish.

\*\*I realize that this might seem to be belittling the impact on the deaf community.  I don't mean to do that, and in fact, I'd hope that they'd get a lot of benefits.  However, in terms of a policy that you might get not only governments but also their citizens behind, I'm inclined to appeal to the self-interest of the average voter, who doesn't specifically want to talk to deaf people but does want to be able to chat to their mates in a noisy bar while holding (and possibly even drinking) a pint.

3 Added, because I just realized that I hadn't been clear that I was aware that every country has its own version (or versions) of sign language.  Yes, you'd need to either pick one or make one from scratch.
gpt
Aren't sign languages specific to each country?

There are at least 300 different sign languages according to Wikipedia.

Learning north american or english sign language doesn't help internationally because it will be a different sign language in India and China.