‘Understanding Others in a Neurodiverse World’ by Gemma Williams (2024)

Autistic linguist Gemma Williams’ 2024 book Understanding Others in a Neurodiverse World explicitly aligns with the neurodiversity paradigm, as opposed to the unfortunately still-dominant pathology paradigm. The latter views neurodivergence as a pathological aberration that must be corrected, whereas the former sees neurodivergence as a natural part of human diversity, just like for instance cultural diversity (cf. Nick Walker’s definitions of and writing on the two paradigms.)

With regards to the theoretical foundation, Williams explores manifold ways in which these two diametrically opposed paradigms manifest in the context of autistic language use (Williams focuses on autism) and cross-neurotype communication, taking the reader on a necessarily short tour of the various pathologising attempts to define exactly what it is that impairs autistic people both in general and specifically with view to language use (termed here ‘the traditional view’ of ‘autistics as ‘impaired’ speakers’ [64]), as well as alternative, neurodiversity-affirming explanations.

Particularly valuable in the context of using constructed languages (‘conlangs’) to explore autistic language use differences is the book’s in-depth overview of research on how and why autistic language use differs from allistic language use and neuronormative communication standards. It not only summarises key evidence for reframing supposed autistic language deficits as language differences, but the concrete domains addressed here, including but not limited to literalness, prosody and pronoun use, can serve as starting points for linguistic features to tackle in an autistic conlang.