"With foreign deaf people I use a combination of signs and lip reading."
  • When deaf people communicate with people who use a different sign language, it's called 'international sign' or 'cross-signing'. It isn't a visual esperanto, but it's a way to use the visual features of sign language as well as possible shared spoken languages in a way that allows for communication. Many deaf people are surprisingly good at this, but we're still unsure about how well this truly works, and how people do it exactly. That's why Radboud University is researching this in a large project from 2017 through 2022.
  • A relevant up-and-coming term is 'visual vernacular'; this is mostly used in theatrical stories that should be understandable for signers all over the world (and possibly for non-signers). See these two beautiful examples: