Sign language. It’s an official language. Yet few people can speak it. And that can be annoying for people who are deaf or hard of hearing. The Netherlands has 1.5 million deaf and hearing impaired people. Only 1.7% of the population speaks Dutch sign language. This means most Dutch people can’t make a connection with the deaf people in our country.

At T-Mobile we believe everyone should be able to connect. We decided to help Court to get his generation interested in sign language. One of the things they are obsessed with is learning dance moves on TikTok. The hand gestures of these popular TikTok dances looks very similar to sign language.

So we launched TikTok Sign Dance. In partnership with the platform for Dutch Sign Language courses. Together with famous Dutch artist Sor - who is also hearing impaired - we created a song that contains useful opening lines in sign language.

With these lyrics, a deaf dance group created a sign language-based choreography. To make the TikTok song and dance comprehensive in real life. Thanks to the TikTok filter with a hand gestures tutorial everybody learned the right moves. And many dance ambassadorsjoined our movement and spread our message.

In the first two weeks this already resulted in 30 million impressions.
Even the biggest sign language Superbowl star, Justina Miles, joined our movement. The TikTok-content we created became sign language tutorials for schools, supported and shared by the most popular teachers in The Netherlands.

This is how we successfully educated the TikTok generation, on the basics of sign language.