Fixing Language: ‘People-First’ Language, Taxonomical Prescriptivism, and the Linguistic Location of Disability

This paper explores a range of perspectives on people-first language, considering how the taxonomical prescriptivism in policy since the early 1990s locates disability as a detachable part of an individual. I attend both to some activists’ championing of this linguistic turn for its recognition of personhood outside impairment and to the charge within disability studies that it restricts the conceptual domain of disability to physical impairment. Moreover, I examine how people-first language is both the product of prescriptive policy documents as well as a contributing factor in future policy – determining, for instance, whether disability initiatives are intended to focus on physical rehabilitation or improved accessibility. Lastly, I turn to recent work in sociolinguistics on political correctness and people-first language, positioning it against various approaches to the ethical valence of such linguistic modifications, and their potential to remake social realities. My purpose in tracing the status of people-first language in this multitude of discursive venues is to consider the extent to which it determines how disability is conceptualized and consequently realized in more practical settings.