Many Ways to Be Deaf circles the globe - from Asia and Russia to Europe and the United Kingdom, from Africa to South America to the United States - profiling the immense diversity of the world's Deaf communities. Special attention is paid not only to the historical and linguistic origins of each community's signed language, but to the ways each language has been influenced by the hearing population and foreign influences. Twenty-four international contributors of different cultural and scholastic backgrounds make this appraisal truly diverse and expansive in scope.