TikTok is helping deaf Black Americans preserve their brand of sign language, called BASL, or Black American Sign Language. Young Black American TikTok influencers are uploading daily content to promote the little-known dialect.

Nakia Smith, a 22-year-old African-American woman, who has been deaf since birth uses her large following on the increasingly popular social media app to promote BASL.

In her TikToks, Smith tells her 400,000 followers about the differences between her language and the standard American Sign Language (ASL).

In the US, across all age groups, approximately 600,000 people(0.22 percent of the population, or 2.2 per 1,000) are "deaf," with more than half being over 65 years of age.