PFL vs. IFL
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Emily Landau, "Why Person-First Language Doesn’t Always Put the Person First", Think Inclusive 7/20/2015:
There are two main types of language used to refer disability: person-first language and what is known as identity-first language (IFL). PFL as a concept originated among people who wanted to fight back against stigma. In a society that perceived disability as dehumanizing, advocates wanted those around them to remember that having a disability does not, in fact, lessen your personhood. As such, the PFL movement encouraged the use of phrases like “person with disability,” “girl with autism” or “boy who is deaf.” In speaking this way and putting the person first, it was considered a show of respect.
PFL was adopted as a general linguistic rule, moving from use by the people who initiated the movement towards heavy use by those in professional spheres. It essentially became the law of the land. Teachers, doctors, nurses, social service professionals, government officials… everyone was told that they should use only PFL. Using a term such as “disabled person?” A cardinal sin.
However, as with almost any major activism movement, PFL sparked a countermovement, known as identity-first. IFL is a linguistic concept embraced and actually preferred by countless people within the disability community. In the ideology of identity-first, “disabled” is a perfectly acceptable way for a person to identify. Instead of going out of your way to say “person with a disability,” when using IFL you would instead say “disabled person.” This is how I personally choose to identify myself. I am a disabled person.
See also Lorcan Kenny et al., "Which terms should be used to describe autism? Perspectives from the UK autism community", Autism, Published online before print July 1, 2015:
Recent public discussions suggest that there is much disagreement about the way autism is and should be described. This study sought to elicit the views and preferences of UK autism community members – autistic people, parents and their broader support network – about the terms they use to describe autism. In all, 3470 UK residents responded to an online survey on their preferred ways of describing autism and their rationale for such preferences. The results clearly show that people use many terms to describe autism. The most highly endorsed terms were ‘autism’ and ‘on the autism spectrum’, and to a lesser extent, ‘autism spectrum disorder’, for which there was consensus across community groups. The groups disagreed, however, on the use of several terms. The term ‘autistic’ was endorsed by a large percentage of autistic adults, family members/friends and parents but by considerably fewer professionals; ‘person with autism’ was endorsed by almost half of professionals but by fewer autistic adults and parents. Qualitative analysis of an openended question revealed the reasons underlying respondents’ preferences. These findings demonstrate that there is no single way of describing autism that is universally accepted and preferred by the UK’s autism community and that some disagreements appear deeply entrenched.
Laura Morland said,
July 22, 2015 @ 7:33 am
So… why is it that "person-first language doesn’t always put the person first"? I was hoping for an explanation, but if there was one, I missed it.
All I learned was that some people with disabilities prefer being called "disabled" and some disabled people prefer being called "a person with a disability".
Simon K said,
July 22, 2015 @ 7:48 am
Laura – this is only an extract. Click through to the full article by Emily Landau and it should be clear.
Keith said,
July 22, 2015 @ 8:03 am
It looks to me as if this is only being discussed in the context of English language usage. Furthermore, from the two very short extracts of text, I can't decide if this is also primarily about word order.
I can't see much difference between saying "I am an A person", where A is an adjective, and saying "I am a person with N", where N is a noun, the name of the condition. It all looks like personal preference, no doubt shaped by cultural reactions to the conditions.
Still, I always describe myself as "being red-green colour blind", rather than as a person "with red-green colour blindness", and my mother says "I'm deaf" and never "I'm a person with deafness".
JB said,
July 22, 2015 @ 8:43 am
Since the Kenny article has info on respondents' age, it would be interesting to see how usage changes between age groups for each stakeholder group to see if there's a noticeable change in the use of these terms over time, particularly for a term like "Aspie," which is more preferred in the Autistic stakeholder group, which has a pretty steady number of respondents from ages 19-55 but is dispreferred among the Parents and Professionals stakeholder groups, which skew toward the 36-55 age range.
Sockatume said,
July 22, 2015 @ 8:48 am
I have two knee-jerk responses to this information:
1) Perhaps professionals are more focussed on abstractions than the actual needs of the community in question
2) Perhaps individuals are less well-attuned to potential consequences of language, and tend to favour conventional usage over phrasings that would be "better" for them in some sociological way
I imagine that neither of these views is particularly novel or helpful.
One thing that always befuddled me about "person-first" language is that there's an idiom in English where "person of X" is used to emphasise X. For example, "writer of skill" is a greater complement than "skilled writer". So when I run into "person of X" constructs I have tended to assume that they're emphasising X, when of course that's not the intention.
Of course there are plenty of other person-first constructs that don't run into this idiom – "person with X", for example.
On the gripping hand, the reasonable thing to do is to favour whichever terminology the groups, and subgroups, happen to prefer. Why am I busting my brain trying to choose optimal terminology for someone who probably has their own, better ideas?
John Roth said,
July 22, 2015 @ 10:11 am
Back in my misspent middle age, I encountered this distinction without it being associated with disabilities. It's the essential difference between "I am" and "I have." The possibility of change in the first is significantly less than in the second, at least for most people. I didn't see it as having anything to do with respect at that time, and I don't see it as having to do with respect now.
J. W. Brewer said,
July 22, 2015 @ 10:16 am
My unsystematic impression (based in part on following the social-media output of some college contemporaries who grew up to have fulltime careers as advocates/activists in this area and frequently interact with others like that) is that some people in the disability-activism community seem to spend time and energy arguing about proper-language issues to a greater extent than the generic-vaguely-left-wing activist community does. I'm not entirely sure why that should be, and it strikes me (as an outsider whose advice is not being sought, and which I have enough good sense not to volunteer gratuitously . . .) as not particularly productive, not least because (as shown in the linked piece) it leads to unnecessary conflict among people who you would think ought to be cooperating rather than criticizing each other. It seems (as is probably the case in many similar circumstances of obsession about correct terminology) to involve a certain degree of magical thinking, as if a successful social effort to get everyone to use phrasing A rather than phrasing B will itself transform the social circumstances of the group in question for the better. It is difficult for me to figure out (and this is an issue with various types of prescriptivism more generally) whether activists come up with a theory (typically pop-Whorfian and often easy to argue with on strictly linguistic grounds, as demonstrated above) and then come up with a preferred phrasing implementing the theory or whether they instead come up with a preferred phrasing for semi-arbitrary or inchoate reasons (and obviously we all often think a particular phrasing "feels" better than an alternative without being able to articulate exactly why) and then try to come up with a theoretical justification (typically pop-Whorfian ditto) as to why their preference should in fact be preferred.
Nathan said,
July 22, 2015 @ 11:08 am
My first exposure to the idea of PFL was in the deprecation of "autistic". It came across as a weird sort of magical thinking that a rule to use only the noun instead of the adjective could have some effect on social stigma. The extensions of the idea I've come across since then seem equally silly. Fortunately, no one has tried to call me "a person with obesity" so far. That's "gravitationally gifted", TYVM.
Coby Lubliner said,
July 22, 2015 @ 11:45 am
When was it that "people of color" came to be preferred to "colored people"? In the 70s, perhaps? I always thought that the former was just a rendering of the French gens de couleur, and I would generalize from this that the so-called PFL reflects the influence of Romance languages, which often prefer a phrase involving a noun to the corresponding adjective or adverb. The traditional French term for nonferrous metals, for example, is métaux autres que le fer (though nowadays, probably under English influence, they are métaux non ferreux).
Jeremy Pierce said,
July 22, 2015 @ 11:55 am
The one thing I'm aware of where there's hard data of person-first language making a big difference in terms of stereotypes and negative judgments is with very small children. At very early ages of language acquisition, kids tend to essentialize any category you put people into, even if it's a nonsense term. They assume everything in that category is the same, and if there's a negative trait of one item in it then it will be true of the others. They also tend to assume identity-type terms grammatically coming first are more definitive of the nature of something than they do when you use predicate adjectival phrases instead. Apparently the studies that show this also seem to indicate no such effect with older kids or adults. The moral of the story is that person-first language rather than identity categories might well be a great idea when speaking with or around very small children but that it doesn't make a big difference when little kids aren't around. With cognitive developmental issues when you have a person who is at that level of development where this is an issue, it might make sense around them as well.
Daniel Barkalow said,
July 22, 2015 @ 1:34 pm
I think it might be best to choose usage based on whether you're providing a service specifically for the group or providing a service in general that should not exclude member of the group. If you're going to teach linguistics to a class, and you're choosing classroom protocols, it makes sense to consider "students with disabilities", in that your goal is that all of the students learn the same thing, and you're trying to avoid having individual variation affect outcomes. If you're giving a special performance of the play "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time" for "an autistic audience", it's an experience designed around that particular identity, and you're going to accentuate and rely on the differences between that audience and your usual audiences.
Of course, when interacting with an individual, you should find out how they like to be described, but that's obviously not possible when referring to large numbers of strangers.
Rodger C said,
July 22, 2015 @ 2:04 pm
I've actually worked at a college with recycling bins labeled PAPER OF COLOR.
wanda said,
July 22, 2015 @ 2:38 pm
Laura- I think the article is trying to say that because some of the "people with X" themselves prefer the alternative usage "Xist people", insisting on person-first language disregards each person's individual preference. By disregarding a, for instance, autistic person's viewpoint in favor of a viewpoint of a non-disabled advocate, you by definition are *not* "putting the autistic person first."
January First-of-May said,
July 22, 2015 @ 4:40 pm
I personally consider myself an autist (definitely not "an autistic", will probably choose "a person with autism" over "an autistic person"), but that's likely just the influence of my native language. (Incidentally, that's what I thought the post was about when I first saw the title: native language, and its different definitions specifically.)
I dislike the term "aspie" because it seems to be used more often as an insult/pejorative than referring to actual Asperger syndrome, but there's really no other way to say "a person with Asperger syndrome" (apparently there's the word "aspergian", which I've never heard of before; among people I know, the usual shorthand is "an asperger").
On-topic: basically what Daniel Barkalow said. If your intention is inclusionism (i.e. you want to include the disabled people and the people with disabilities in an audience that also includes regular disability-less people), "people with disabilities" is the more correct term; if you want to focus on the special solutions to the problems instead, use "disabled people".
Also (this is similar to the above), it helps to check whether your groups will look like "students with colorblindness, students with deafness, students with Down syndrome" or "colorblind students, colorblind teachers, colorblind parents" (the examples here are random and not intended to refer to anything) and choose the terms accordingly.
And yes, if you refer to an individual, it would indeed be better to just ask them (or their representatives/guardians, if asking them directly is too complicated, such as in case of autism) what type of reference they actually prefer.
Catsidhe said,
July 22, 2015 @ 4:54 pm
I am autistic, and prefer to call myself such.
My opinion is that saying "person with autism" is technically correct, but sounds slightly perverse in the same way as insisting that men be called "people with maleness".
Autism is not something I can separate from my self: I can imagine what sort of person I might be in the absence of autism, but that person is not me.
The thing is, though, that autists tend to prefer calling ourselves "autistic". When professionals say that this is wrong, it comes across as patronising: "no, no, we'll tell you what you should call yourself. You obviously don't understand."
The point raised about emphasis by non-standard phrasing is one I hadn't considered, but now I see it, I can't not see it. By using this less-familiar phrasing, it actually emphasises exactly the attribute which is meant to be downplayed.
Viseguy said,
July 22, 2015 @ 8:26 pm
As a lawyer who works for the government (but who does not identify as a government lawyer, having spent the first half of my career in private practice), I read this post and the ensuing comments (almost said "the comments thereon" :D — actually, no, I didn't ;) ) with great interest and, indeed, gratitude. In my capacity as such, I have from time to time agonized over whether to refer someone as a "person with X", as opposed to "an X'ed person", and now I have, if not a solution to the dilemma, a vocabulary for expressing my agony.
Adrian Morgan said,
July 22, 2015 @ 10:41 pm
I was diagnosed with asperger's in the late eighties, when I was a child of eleven or so.
The language I use to describe myself, on the exceedingly rare situations where the fact that I am on the autism spectrum is pertinent, tends to be language that downplays the significance of autism to my identity and maintains psychological distance. You can see it here: "was diagnosed with asperger's", "on the autism spectrum".
These preferences are closer to person-first rather than identity-first language, but they have nothing to do with asserting my personhood, and they are not in any sense political statements. They are fundamentally emotional, not rational, and I agree strongly with the thesis that trying to rationalise them obscures their true nature and reinforces the false notion that people's preferences need to be rationalised in order to be valid.
I do not think of myself as autistic and I cringe at words like "aspie", but I would not dream of trying to dissuade people who are comfortable with those terms.
Jeff W said,
July 23, 2015 @ 4:26 am
I disagree with this assertion in the article:
It might but I don’t see it that way. Ledau asks “…would you ever make a point of describing someone by saying something like, for example, ‘a person who is Jewish’ or ‘a person who is Asian?’” and the answer is, for me, well, I do something close to it.
I have several, very close friends in China and I don’t refer to them as “my Chinese friends”—if I feel like I have to qualify who they are at all, I say they’re “my friends in China.” Why? Well, it’s not because there is any implication that “Chinese” is a ”negative, derogatory word.“ It’s because the fact that they’re Chinese is not what defines them for me. (The fact that they’re in China does because it relates to how I first got to know them and how I communicate with them now.) And if someone asked me to distinguish my friends on the basis of nationality, I’d say “These are my friends who are Chinese”—they’re just not, in the way I think of them, “my Chinese friends.”
I think there’s some sort of more neutral linguistic principle operating here. Ledau writes “I am disabled just as much as I am a brown-haired, brown-eyed, glasses-wearing female.” But I wouldn’t refer to her, if I had to qualify who she was, as “a glasses-wearing person” even though she says she is, in her words, “as much” that as she is disabled, unless she indicated she preferred that. Is there some linguistic distinction in English where saying something like “a glasses-wearing person” gives rise to at least an inference of the existence of a relevant category like that but “a person who wears glasses” doesn’t? (That’s not rhetorical—I really don’t know.)
Rose Eneri said,
July 23, 2015 @ 9:08 am
I'm surprised no commenters have mentioned Dr. Piker's euphemism treadmill, which I believe is what this article is really about.
Rose Eneri said,
July 23, 2015 @ 9:08 am
Sorry, Dr. Pinker.
Uly said,
July 23, 2015 @ 9:42 am
I was diagnosed with asperger's in the late eighties, when I was a child of eleven or so.
That strikes me as highly unlikely, given that Asperger's didn't enter the DSM until 1993.
[(myl) But as the wikipedia article on the History of Asperger Syndrome explains, Hans Asperger's original paper was published in 1944, and the term was used in an English-language publication in 1962, and in another broadly-influential publication in 1981. So DSM or no, the term would have been well known to specialists in the late 1980s, and a diagnosis then would have been quite possible.]
J. W. Brewer said,
July 23, 2015 @ 12:00 pm
The funny thing about the euphemism treadmill is that sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. One obvious example in AmEng is that the Negro->black transition was pretty thoroughgoing over not all that long a time period, but the black->African-American transition got off to a quick start and then got stuck (or at least is progressing on a very different timescale). Presumably that's because the percentage of the relevant population(s) that was so uncomfortable with the older term as to want to abandon it was significant but fell short of some sort of critical mass, and it turned out that the activists demanding that everyone else change their usage to "call our group what it wants to be called" did not have unanimity or near-unanimity behind them in the constituency they purported to represent. With the group(s) under discussion here, the treadmill did succeed fairly well within my own lifetime in consigning "handicap[ped]" to the dustbin of lexical history (except perhaps in some fixed idioms, and non-disability-related uses having to do with golf or horseracing) and have likewise mostly driven "retarded" out of polite usage (and are now working on making it taboo as a school-playground insult). But this one apparently isn't going so well. I wonder if they moved too quickly — if you get the "well-meaning outsiders" like medical and educational and social-work bureaucrats all self-consciously converted to the new form early enough, members of the group in question are less likely to hear the deprecated form used by such well-meaning outsiders in ways that are subjectively experienced as patronizing/condescending and thus give rise to the accumulated-over-time baggage of negative associations that makes the treadmill work.
Coby Lubliner said,
July 23, 2015 @ 2:21 pm
JWB: The quick demise of Negro in favor of black was greatly influenced, I believe, by Malcolm X's sardonic references to "the so-called Negro." It has always seemed curious to me that the English word was felt as preferable to the Spanish/Portuguese one meaning the same thing, not to mention the Latin one (the respelling with 2 Gs is an 18th-century artifact seemingly aimed at preserving a Latin-like pronunciation). African-American had in turn been preceded by Afro-American (which is etymologically better since it refers to the Latin afer rather than to the continent of Africa, not all of whose population is black), and won out because of the association of "afro" with a hairstyle.
BZ said,
July 23, 2015 @ 3:38 pm
I always wondered why Jewish was preferred over "Jew". It was especially bewildering coming from a language (Russian) where an ethnicity/religion cannot be adjectivised, at least when describing a person. It sounds like the same kind of idea.
As for disabled, it just sounds too harsh, implying having no abilities whatsoever. Also, it can be confusing. I am disabled and when I was in college (Penn, in fact) they had a shuttle service for the disabled called "Handivan" (the spelling might be incorrect). Except the name of the service was not publicized, so when I was at orientation and needed to call them, I asked something like "is this the disabled transportation service? I mean transportation for the disabled?" Still getting "huh?" on the other end.
But making it a noun is not the solution. Use "handicapped". The person at the other end of the phone conversation understood that right off, and it's not as final as "disabled".
Chris Waigl said,
July 23, 2015 @ 4:02 pm
Uly's comment strikes me as rather rude. Calling into doubt someone's first-person experience report should require, IMHO, more than what appears to be no more than partial knowledge. At the very least, the commenter might have consulted a dictionary. OED has:
1971 Jrnl. Autism & Childhood Schizophrenia 1 82 Early infantile autism and autistic psychopathy were first reported within the span of 1 year (1943–1944). While the former (Kanner's syndrome) has become the widely known focus of intensive investigation, the latter (Asperger's syndrome) did not receive the attention it deserves.
1981 L. Wing in Psychol. Med. 11 115/1 The name he [sc. Asperger] chose for this pattern was autistic psychopathy, using the latter word in the technical sense of an abnormality of personality. This has led to a misunderstanding because of the popular tendency to equate psychopathy with sociopathic behaviour. For this reason, the neutral term Asperger's syndrome is to be preferred and will be used here.
1987 Developmental Med. & Child Neurol. 29 641/2 It is possible that the three boys with Asperger syndrome (AS) would have been diagnosed as having infantile autism.
On the larger point, it seems to me that people expect too much or too little of language and terminology. Yes, there are nuances, and I see their most useful aspect in the insight one gains from considering them. There are even arguments in favour of preferring some nuances over others in certain official settings. The point made upthread about educating small children rings right to me. (As an aside: In elementary school I had a classmate with cerebral palsy. Even those of us who didn't call him derogatory names ("Spasti" etc.) would have benefitting by an adult sitting us down and adjusting our view of him from "the disabled kid" (ie, who is different, and widely shunned) to "a classmate with a disability" (ie, who was part of our group, regardless of what set him apart.) But of course people have the right to have preferences about how they want to be referred to, and there's no particular reason for all of them to agree in their preferences. Which doesn't mean there aren't patterns, of course, which deserve to be taken into account. But between insider and outsider perspectives, ignorance, outdated uses remaining in someone's speech, worthy though potentially conflicting goals, personal speech patterns etc, it's futile to read too much into an individual speaker's usage, such as the difference between saying "X's daughter, who is autistic", "… who has autism" and "… who is a girl with autism". There isn't just one circle that needs squaring here.
Jeff W said,
July 23, 2015 @ 4:24 pm
J. W. Brewer
My impression is that what caused “African-American” to get stuck is that it, in effect, lumped all black Americans together as “being from Africa,” including those who did not self-identify as being from Africa— but, rather, from some place that was not in Africa (e.g., Haitian or Jamaican blacks)—even though ultimately their ancestors might be from there. It would be like calling white Australian-Americans “European-Americans”—sure, by and large, they can trace their ancestry back to Europe but they might not want to define themselves (or have themselves defined) that way. It’s not a problem of over-inclusiveness—it’s a problem of not being at the right level of specificity for some of the people in the group that’s being referred to. (There’s also the inverse situation of people who are from Africa but not black not being referred to as “African-American”—people probably don’t think of Teresa Heinz Kerry, who was born in Mozambique and educated mostly in Africa, when they hear the phrase “African American”—which highlights the difficulty with the term.)
Adrian Morgan said,
July 23, 2015 @ 6:09 pm
@Chris Waigl — Rude it may be, but it's also unintentionally amusing, and a good laugh is a fine way to start the day. :-)
(Though it's not as hilarious as the time a certain troublemaker told me I was lying when I mentioned one of the more innovative conclusions of The Cambridge Grammar. I almost dared him to email Geoff Pullum and publish his reply, but I didn't have enough popcorn. And he wouldn't have done so anyway.)
Jason said,
July 23, 2015 @ 9:22 pm
"Autistic" in particular is now internet slang for "anyone who shows social ineptitude or cluelessness of any kind." So it doesn't matter whether it's "person with autism" or "autistic", it's stepped onto the euphemism treadmill and will be unusable inside ten or twenty years anyway.
January First-of-May said,
July 24, 2015 @ 12:46 pm
@ Jeff W:
Elon Musk might be a better known example [of a white American who was born and grew up in Africa] than Teresa Heinz Kerry (though he'd lived in Canada for a few years before going to the USA, which means that some refer to him as Canadian-American).
Then there's the problem with Barack Obama, who is a black American of recent African origin (his father was a Kenyan immigrant, and his mother was white; Reitwiesner, before 2010, wrote that "none of Obama's ancestors lived under slavery in North America", though it had since been proven that at least one did, in the 17th century).
Jeff W said,
July 24, 2015 @ 4:09 pm
@January First-of-May
I did not know that about Elon Musk—yes, I agree, he is! Thanks.
J. W. Brewer said,
July 24, 2015 @ 4:29 pm
I would nominate the actress Charlize Theron as that sort of "African-American" (indeed, the specific subset you might call Afrikaner-American), as she might be better known that Musk and Mrs. Kerry put together.
I remember back in the '90's meeting an Egyptian-American college student who seemed genuinely puzzled (i.e. not just pretending to be baffled in order to score some polemical point) about why he was not considered "African-American."
But all of these things are non-compositional. By current AmEng "Asian-American," we mean "immigrants or descendants of immigrants from some, but not all, parts of Asia (excluding some people who may have been born in those specific parts of Asia but are racially/ethnically atypical of their place of birth)."
Glenfarclas said,
July 24, 2015 @ 9:56 pm
I always thought that the real problem that stuck the knife into "African-American" was that it left you with no good term to describe Nelson Mandela. At least, no term that could distinguish him from De Klerk. Oh yeah, and also it's long and unwieldy.
Chas Belov said,
July 25, 2015 @ 2:32 am
We had an awkward moment at a social event about 10 years ago when we were having foods from different cultures. The sign-maker of European ancestry asked someone of African ancestry what term to use for the American cuisine of African ancestry and was told to use "Afro-American cuisine" which they did. Another attendee of African ancestry expressed offense at this. The sign-maker gave up and changed the sign to simply read "American cuisine."
I believe African-American (or African American; some people have feelings about hyphenation) was the most common term at the time, although black (or Black; some people have feelings about capitalization) was also still current.
As a Jew, I prefer Jewish, although I don't have a clear concept of why. I also refer to myself as gay (or Gay; some people capitalize this) and occasionally as queer, although I'm not quite comfortable with non-queers using the term queer. When I first came out, it was not unusual for many activists to self-identify as faggot. It is my perception that group members who prefer African American or Native American feel more strongly in favor of those terms than those group members who prefer black or American Indian, but I don't have statistics to back this up. I do regularly interact with group members who use black.
I vary between using black or African-American depending on context, and have switched to using indigenous American. The problem is that no member of the group can make a mistake when referring to themself, but non-members following the lead of any random member risk running afoul of the euphemism treadmill. That doesn't relieve non-members of the obligation to be sensitive.
Bob said,
July 26, 2015 @ 9:31 am
Remember the quip attributed to Lenny Bruce: "I'm not a Jew, I'm Jew-ISH".