Because many deaf Americans belong to a broader Deaf culture and because a portion of them speak only American Sign Language, it is important that this be reflected in the data collected by the US Census Bureau. Under the current policy, any instance of 'Language spoken in the home' written in as ASL becomes coded as 'English' for the purpose of record keeping and reporting. This is inaccurate, and skews the data toward English being represented as the majority language, and ASL being non-existent. Likewise, it is impossible under the current system to know the percentage of the population which consider themselves to be culturally Deaf. Adding an option under the 'Ethnicity' category, much like the option for 'Latino', while allowing multiple boxes to be checked would remedy this issue.
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