Personal vocabulary

Also called Personalised vocabulary, Individual vocabulary, Custom words

Adding the words that matter to this person: names, in-jokes, the football team, the swear word. The layer that makes a system theirs.

What it is

Personal vocabulary is the set of words and phrases that belong to one person and nobody else: the names of their family, friends, carers and pets; their street, school, workplace and club; the food they like and the food they refuse; their team, their programmes, their music; their nicknames and their jokes. It is the part of a vocabulary no supplier can ship, because only the people around the person know it.

It sits on top of core and general fringe, and it is the part most often left empty.

Who it can help

Everyone with an AAC system, from day one. A child whose device can say "dog" but not the dog's name is being handed a stranger's vocabulary. An adult in a care home whose device can name the days of the week but not the daughter who visits on Thursdays cannot talk about the thing that matters most.

It also includes the words people are squeamish about: swearing, slang, sex, the names for body parts the person actually uses. An adult's device should be able to say what an adult says, and a teenager's should be able to be a teenager. See adult vocabulary and relationships vocabulary. Leaving them out is a decision about the person's life that isn't the editor's to make.

How it works

Personal words go into the page set in the right places: names on the people page, with a photograph if the person prefers; places on the places page; a "my stuff" or "about me" page for interests, opinions and sayings. Devices let a partner add a cell with a word, a symbol or photo and a spoken form, and most let the spoken form differ from the label, which is how "Nan" can be pronounced properly.

The process is continuous. A person's life changes weekly, so the vocabulary should too, and the best predictor of whether it does is whether one named person has the job. See personalising a vocabulary for the mechanics.

Getting started

Sit with the person and list twenty names. Family, friends, staff, pets, the neighbour. Add them today, with photographs where the person wants them.

Ask what they'd say if they could say anything. Their answer, in their words, goes in as phrases. Include the rude ones if they want them.

Set a weekly ten minutes. The words the person needed and didn't have this week get added on the same day each week, by the same person, forever.

Where to get help

The speech and language therapist or specialised AAC service who set the device up will show a family how to add words; most run short sessions for exactly this. Communication Matters and 1Voice connect families with adult AAC users who can say, from experience, what was missing from their own vocabularies.