The rise of the Deaf Pride movement in the 1980s has introduced a distinction between the lowercase deaf and the capitalized form Deaf. A person who is unable to hear or whose hearing is only minimal is properly termed deaf. A deaf person who belongs to the community that has formed around the use of American Sign Language as the preferred means of communication is said to be Deaf or a member of Deaf culture. The issue of capitalization is different with deaf than it is for black. In the case of black, the decision whether to capitalize is essentially a matter of personal or political preference; use of the capitalized form, though, does not differentiate one black person from another. With deaf, on the other hand, the capitalized form has a different meaning than the lowercased form, and the two should be carefully distinguished so as to avoid misunderstanding. Only if a person is self-identified as belonging to Deaf culture should you refer to him or her as Deaf.
1
The expression hearing-impaired is not an exact equivalent of deaf. Though hearing-impaired can logically denote total deafness and deaf can be used of different degrees of hearing loss, the former strongly suggests that a person retains some capacity to detect sound.
