The Natural Language of Autism?

Amanda Baggs is an autistic woman who is inspiring some extremely interesting Internet discussion on the meaning of language, specifically in relation to her video, In My Language, which purports to document her native language as an autistic person, in which she communicates through motions and humming with her entire environment.

The temptation when viewing the video is just to look at Amanda as something of a spastic, as we view many autistics. But Amanda is actually an extremely intelligent woman, and has offered up some compelling discussion on her language of autism on both her extraordinarily verbose blog and this Metafilter thread about her video.

It's interesting how many people describe what I do as checking out of reality, or various variants on this. In fact, this has more to do with which parts of reality a person is paying attention to. Somehow it is "reality" to engage in a lot of abstract symbolic thought (and sort of paste that thought on over one's surroundings and believe oneself to be perceiving them) but "not reality" to engage in interaction more or less directly with one's surroundings....

Last September I went to a conference, where there were a number of other autistic people present. Most of us did not talk directly to each other much. Many of us did, however, subtly alter our movements in order to convey things to each other. When I got home, there were emails from a woman who was there who had correctly picked up on the meaning of what I was doing and vice versa. She had circled the table where I was sitting, and I had vaguely altered the rhythm and tone of my movements. This was a form of mutual acknowledgement. Another time I had a conversation across a room with someone about a plant in the corner without either of us saying anything. (No, this isn't telepathy, it's being highly aware of each other's reactions.) The interesting part being that in both of these instances, most people would not have seen any communication taking place.

I can not pretend to have read even a small part of Amanda's thoughts on the subject, but while I am fascinated by the entire concept, I think these paragraphs betray a confusion about the difference between communication and language, which are certainly not the same things. The example Amanda describes at the end is not her speaking in a native language: it's a highly charged form of body language that, when all is said and done,

Regardless of what you might thing, her thoughts on the subject are riveting, and a very clear-headed (although possibly incorrect) philosophy of autistic communication.

Amanda Baggs Autism Blog