Housing
For Providers
People First Language
The disability community has developed preferred terminology – People First Language – in order to eliminate prejudicial language and to contribute to the end of discrimination and segregation in employment, education, housing, and our communities at large. People First Language is an objective way of acknowledging, communicating, and reporting about disabilities, eliminating generalizations, assumptions, and stereotypes.
As the term implies, People First Language refers to the individual first and the disability second. It is the difference between saying “the autistic” and “a child with autism.” While some people may not use preferred terminology, it is important not to repeat negative terms that stereotype, devalue, or discriminate. Equally important, ask yourself if the disability is even relevant and needs to be mentioned when referring to individuals.
What should you say?
The Texas Council for Developmental Disabilities provides these guidelines for using appropriate People First language:
- Recognize that people with disabilities are ordinary people with common goals for a home, a job, and a family. Talk about people in ordinary terms.
- Never equate a person with a disability – such as referring to someone as retarded, an epileptic, or quadriplegic. These labels are simply medical diagnoses. Use People First Language to tell what a person HAS, not what a person IS.
- Emphasize abilities, not limitations. Say, for example, a man walks with crutches, not he is crippled.
- Avoid negative words that imply tragedy, such as afflicted with, suffers, victim, prisoner, and unfortunate.
- Recognize that a disability is not a challenge to overcome, and do not say people succeed in spite of a disability. Ordinary things and accomplishments do not become extraordinary just because they are done by a person with a disability. What is extraordinary are the lengths people with disabilities have to go through and the barriers they have to overcome to do the most ordinary things.
- Use “handicap” to refer to a barrier created by people or the environment. Use “disability” to indicate a functional limitation that interferes with a person’s mental, physical, or sensory abilities, such as walking, talking, hearing, and learning. For example, people with disabilities who use wheelchairs are handicapped by stairs, narrow doorways and curbs.
- Do not refer to a person as “bound to” or “confined to “ a wheelchair. Wheelchairs are liberating to people with disabilities because they provide mobility.
- Do not use “special” to mean segregated, such as separate schools or buses for people with disabilities, or to suggest a disability itself makes someone special.
- Avoid cute euphemisms, such as physically challenged, inconvenienced, and differently abled.
- Promote understanding, respect, dignity, and positive outlooks.