'A part of me was crying for freedom': The people embracing their stutter

Eighty million people around the world have a natural stammer. Krupa Padhy speaks to those who've decided to embrace it – and discovers surprising benefits.

It was the summer of 2011 and Joshua St Pierre was working in Edmonton, Canada. He was mid-conversation when he realised the other person wasn't listening. It was a moment that changed his life.

St Pierre has a stammer, and until then, had always focused on trying to speak as fluently as he could, to make it more comfortable for others to listen to him. But now, he began to wonder if it was fair for him to be the one doing all the work – and what a more balanced effort might feel like.

"I I I, like most people, spent most of my l lifetime desperately trying to come up to a standard of nooormalcy," says St Pierre, who has asked that his quotes in this article include the words he stammers on. "I was doing a whole lot to try and make other people feel comfortable when it really actually wasn't much about communication itself."

An estimated 80 million people around the world speak with a stammer (also known as a stutter in many countries), meaning, they know what they wish to say, but have difficulty saying the words. Their speech is disrupted by repetitions, pauses or stops. There is still no clear explanation of what exactly causes stammering, but research suggests that the region of the brain responsible for planning and executing our speech functions differently in those with a stammer. 

Many children – between 60-80% – who have a stutter will recover spontaneously. But contrary to popular belief, there isn't a permanent fix to overcoming a stammer. Whilst treatment and support are available (such as speech language therapy), a high number of people with stammers may relapse after completing therapy. It can be a life-long effort to suppress a stammer, something US President Joe Biden has spoken about openly.

As St Pierre notes, however, the physical impact is only one aspect of the condition. Another is social and may be more about how stammering is perceived in the mind of the listener. Studies suggest, for example, that people who stammer openly may be considered anxious, nervous or embarrassing, purely because of that speech pattern. In a paper inspired by his conversation in Edmonton, St Pierre, who is now a researcher in critical disability studies at the University of Alberta, Canada, argues that this social perception of stammering as "broken speech" is not really about the stammer itself. It's about the listener's "cultural norms of efficiency, pace, and self-mastery", and their expectations of what successful communication should be like: succinct and fluent. (You can hear St Pierre talk about attitudes towards stammering in his own words later in this article.)

"It's not the fact that having d d d dysfluent speech that causes the breakdown,” argues St Pierre. "It's the way in which these forms of speech aren't able to be taken up within the world and heard urm as speech. That's a really cruel thing, and that's a political thing."

St Pierre and others, including some speech therapists, are suggesting an alternative view of stammering: not as a deficiency, but as a way of speaking that is no better or worse than any others.

In fact, stammering openly can have many benefits, says Courtney Byrd, a professor of speech, language and hearing sciences at the University of Texas at Austin, US. She and her team have been working on a model of treatment that encourages people to stammer with confidence, even if others around them see it as a deficiency.  

"We encourage stuttering openly for effective communication, because when you are avoiding it, you are essentially stifling your own intellect," says Byrd. "I'm going to say [to people who stutter]: you can be the most effective communicator and still openly stutter. And I'm going to show you the path to that. And I also want you to know that no matter where you live, you are going to encounter highly educated people who are completely ignorant about stuttering, and because they are ignorant they are going to treat you ignorantly. They are going to say things that will hurt, and they'll say things to you out of trying to help you."

Byrd gives the example of teachers offering students who stammer the opportunity to pre-record presentations, thinking they are helping them. But not letting them give the presentation live, ultimately puts the stammerer at a disadvantage, she says: "That child gets to college and hasn't had a chance to practise their skills like other students have." 

Speaking to people with a stammer from different countries and cultures, it is striking how similar some of their experiences are – both in terms of the pain they suffered through due to the prejudices of those around them, but also, the relief of no longer hiding it.

Jia Bin was born in a small village in Sichuan province in southwest China. Her parents were poor, and she felt she was adding to their burden when she began to stammer as a child.

"It came to a point where I hated myself," she says. "There were two forces in me – one was to communicate, the other was not to speak. I feel like I compromised a lot of my authenticity." 

Bin chose to leave China, and move to the US, partly because she feared her stutter would never be fully accepted at home. "I was holding down a job, I was married, I gave birth to my daughter before coming to America at 32. I completed what society wants a normal Chinese girl to do, but I was so miserable. There was a part of me crying for freedom. I'd never seen a successful person who stutters in China."

Bin now runs a stammer support group on the Chinese social media platform WeChat, and is studying for a PhD in communicative sciences and disorders at Michigan State University. She no longer hides her stutter, and finds this freeing, but her family still struggles to accept it. Upon a recent trip to China, she decided to stammer openly for the first time at a family gathering. Older relatives gossiped and the children laughed at her. "If you were able to hide it for 30 years, why don't you continue to hide it for another 30 years?" asked her mother.

Shilpa Sagwal grew up in India, and changed schools several times as a child because her father's government job involved moving often. With each move came the challenge of introducing herself to a group of new classmates. She'd struggle to get out the Sh sound to say her name. "It put me in a shell which was very hard to come out of," says Sagwal, who now lives in Delhi. "The only support expected in an Indian household is that it has to be treated."

Sagwal speaks both English and Hindi, and stammers more in Hindi. She was taken to various doctors and healers. "They used to call it colour therapy where they would apply colours like yellow and blue on my hands at certain points," she says. "Then there was magnetic therapy where I was supposed to put magnets on certain points of my hands. And I did it all when I was younger because I wanted to be cured." Where conventional speech therapy was available, it was largely based on English-language research, and Sagwal didn't find it effective for her stammer.

After many years of trying to stay as silent as she could, her postgraduate studies took her to a new city where she connected with the Indian Stammering Association. Interacting and working with others from the stammering community changed Sagwal's life. She now stammers openly, and finds it a relief not to engage in treatments anymore.

By the time he got to junior high school, Apreko was increasingly conscious about his speech. "I wouldn't speak in class. I was head boy but I dedicated all my responsibilities to my assistant. I didn't want to address the school. My stammer was mild to moderate, with little tactics here and there, you are able to hide it. I was battling with what I was feeling inside," he says. 

However, after university, Apreko grew tired of hiding his stammer. He founded the Ghana Stammering Association to support others, and the organisation has now joined the Ghana Federation of Disability Organisations. "It was when I accepted my stammer that did the magic for me," he says. "I don't have to hide it to function effectively."

Classifying stammering as a disability is a divisive subject, because as St Pierre puts it, "the power of ableism is so strong" – meaning, some people with a stammer may not wish to identify as disabled. For Apreko, however, doing so has been transformative.

Former Ernst and Young partner Iain Wilkie spent 40 years of his life feeling ashamed of his stammer. He first started stammering at the age of seven and was bullied for it by other children. But in 2022, he gave a TED talk in London in which he described stuttering as a gift: "I'd like to start by telling you that I stutter and I'm ok with that," he began. "It took me 35 years to be ok with that. And I hope it's ok with you."

Wilkie, who heads the charity 50 Million Voices, which offers support to people with a stammer in the workplace, believes those who stammer are a huge pool of under-used talent.

"It's rubbish to think people who stutter can't communicate well," he says. On the contrary, he is convinced that people who stammer are very good with words. "There's great presence, we give each other time, it's like a slow down and we just wait for those words to arrive," says Wilkie, referring to meetings with colleagues who stammer. "This is the team that listens best. When the stuttered word arrives, it comes with a power and weight."

Ronan Miller has studied the relationship between stammering and language-learning for his PhD at the University of Valencia, in Spain. It's something he has first-hand experience of. As a young adult, he moved from Britain to Spain, to leave behind the stress he had experienced when stammering in English. Now, even though he stammers more in Spanish than in English, he finds freedom in speaking another language.

"The language-learning classroom could also be considered a place where disfluency is expected, which is contrary to most other speaking contexts," says Miller. "In this sense, it could provide more of a level playing field than other communicative contexts."

Miller also finds that people who stammer have a different relationship with language than fluent speakers. "Many of us are used to being quite nimble linguistically as a way of navigating a fluency-centric world, for example by varying syntax or using synonyms to reduce the impact of stammering," he says. "However, I think that for this to happen the needs of students who stammer need to be understood and recognised in the classroom."

That understanding and recognition is paramount, because as those interviewed for this article point out, individual resilience alone does not fully solve the question of how to survive and thrive in an often hostile world. Bin and Sagwal have, for example, both experienced anxiety since becoming mothers. Even though they now embrace their own stammers, they worry their children may face the same struggle they did. "I do not want my child to suffer the same things which I have," says Sagwal. "I'm dreading his first words."

As one research paper notes, people with a stammer still face social rejection from childhood through adulthood, with studies documenting wide-ranging discrimination including worse job prospects and lower earnings. As St Pierre points out in his paper on how cultural norms shape ideas of "broken speech", we as a society also have an important part to play in normalising voices that don't sound like our own, for example, by focusing on the speaker's message and intention, not how fluent they are. There is much more to language than just words. 

St Pierre has found his own liberation in not just accepting, but enjoying his way of communicating. "I now speak thinking about my own pleasure that I find in speaking as opposed to the the displeasure that my l l listeners are going to receive," he says. "So so that's way more important."  

* This article was updated on 6 February 2024 to clarify that Jia Bin attended Michigan State University, not University of Michigan as previously stated.

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