Wir Körperbehinderten wollen aber ebenfalls keine Krüppel mehr sein

This paper examines the lexical and semantic change of Behinderung ‘disability’ in 20th and 21st century Germany. It establishes a linguistic perspective on the emergence and disappearance of different linguistic expressions such as Krüppel ‘cripple’, erbkrank ‘hereditarily ill’, kriegsbeschädigt ‘damaged in war’ or schwerbeschädigt ‘severely damaged’. Quantitative corpus linguistic methods document that the adjectival modifier behindert ‘disabled’ and the nominalization Behinderte(r) have emerged from the verb behindern ‘to disable’ via a passive construction with the past participle (jemand ist behindert) and a predicative adjective usage. Qualitative analyses of discourses on disability show that the dichotomy of behindert/nichtbehindert was established due to a striving for political visibility and empowerment. Consequently, since the 1970s, various internally differentiated and hierarchized groups have been collectivized under one label. The paper also examines critical voices from the so-called cripple movement as well as current linguistic trends.