Sign language is the way that many deaf people talk with each other. Many of the Deaf in our country consider American Sign Language to be their primary language and think of English as a "second language." In American Sign Language (ASL) there are signs for most words. Words that don't have a sign are "fingerspelled" using a group of signs called the "manual alphabet" which represent individual letters.

Lipreading is another of the ways deaf people converse. A few people call this "speechreading," because it really involves a lot more than just the lips. It involves observing the speaker's whole face and, in fact, the whole body and surroundings. Even then, it's difficult to do and misunderstandings are frequent. Many deaf people wear hearing aids. If they aren't profoundly deaf, hearing aids can make lipreading a lot easier.