#altverbal

nonverbal autistic ✅️ valid

ok thats all. back into the inactivity pit

It's fine if some people like this treatment, more power to them, that's a part of being a person--you decide what you want in your life. But people also really need to acknowledge that just because someone doesn't speak like you, it doesn't mean they're worth less or childlike or in need of babying. Don't assume that someone's a soft innocent baby just because they have issues with speech or text.

I have used the term "demiverbal" to describe my verbal ability for a number of years now since I came across it here on Tumblr and watched its popularity slowly grow. It was coined in 2023 by @witchy-fennec, and has since been used to describe a range of experiences that fall between semiverbal and fully verbal. I felt very seen coming across this small community of autistic people that didn't feel like they fit in fully verbal or semiverbal autistic spaces. However, as I am not a linguist or highly familiar with certain roots, I didn't realize that the prefixes semi- and demi- actually mean the same thing (they just have roots in different languages). Because of this, many semiverbal autistic feel this term to be intrusive on their community and an inaccurate description of the experience we are calling "demiverbal". I thought it would be important to make this post on Tumblr since this is where the term originated and largely where it is still used today. I know this won't reach everyone that it needs to, but please reblog and share as much as you can. I personally am choosing to identify as "majorityverbal", an alternative term coined by @schizophrenicbulbasaur with functionally the same meaning as demiverbal. Feel free to share any other alternatives you have seen, and make it known that the flag I created for "demiverbal" will also now be recognized as "majorityverbal" or any other term that is more accurate. (I know I can't force anyone to change how they identify, but I want to do my part in explaining this to as many people as possible to stop disinformation in its tracks and fix the mistakes that were made by me and the many other demiverbal individuals who failed to recognize the issue up until this point.)

We no longer claim the identity of nonverbal- we've been practicing speech post-catatonia and can actually speak again. Not always the way we want to be able to, not always for very long, but. It would be wrong to continue saying we are nonverbal when we are more generally altverbal/semiverbal now. So just a little note to update folks 🩷

it's a generally held belief among AAC users that AAC is for anyone, which means it absolutely isn't appropriation for those who are verbalflux to use it!

demiverbal people, tell us about your experiences!