How many deaf people are there in the world?
It’s hard to arrive at a figure since deaf people have not been counted as a separate category in the U.S. Census since the 1930’s. At best a number can only be estimated. The Gallaudet Research Institute (GRI) published a study in 1971 which showed Deaf/HoH persons making up 8.6% of the US Population, 20,295,000 out of a total population of 235,688,000 at the time. Extrapolating those figures to remain constant when the US population hit 400,000,000+ it would mean there are presently 40,000,000 Deaf/HoH people in the USA today. One difficulty in figuring out how many deaf people there are in the United States is that there are several different definitions of what ‘deaf’ is and what number one arrives at depends largely on the definition one used. Some people define deaf as only those who cannot hear anything at all. Others define as those who can hear very little. And still others define it as those who can hear but not understand what they are hearing. Any person using one definitio
