This is a question I’ve been wondering for a while, but no matter how much I search, I just can’t find any relevant results. I’m hoping that the people of this community can provide some resources about this topic, or if nothing else some interesting conjecture or discussion.

The sort of specific inspiration behind this question was thinking about how autistic people are a source of very innovative language use, and are often more likely to acquire and never unlearn “wrong” forms of words or grammar. A handful of linguistic traits that I’ve seen pathologized in autistic people where I live are more or less accepted in the speech of some other speech communities around the world. So, given some people’s beliefs on the role of autistic people in prehistory, could a historical speech community looking to adopt distinctive speech patterns, turn to its neurodiverse population for inspiration?

But I’m also curious about disabilities or disorders aside from autism. How have things like deafness/hearing impairment, blindness/visual impairment, facial paralysis or motor issues, dyslexia, intellectual disability, limb loss, and so forth, affected spoken language, written language, and signed language, as used by language communities as a whole? With regard to sign language, I’ve heard that the high rate of blindness among the Deaf community of Honduras’ Bay Islands resulted in the development of a tactile form of the local village sign. I’m sure that given the rate of disability prior to modern medicine, probably especially among venerated elders, that some amount of language development in the world must have been motivated by accessibility in the same way as BISL — or at the very least caused by inaccessibility, i.e. mishearings or mispronunciations due to disability getting passed on to abled acquaintances.

So yeah. Even though most of the world has for a pretty long time now been pretty ableist, and this is reflected in many languages’ vocabularies, I’m still wondering if there are any linguistic clues that our abled ancestors did in fact try to take good care of their disabled brethren. This is what the archaeological record seems to show, so how about the linguistic record?