Languages are like lenses that allow us to see the world in different colors. In other words, any language is, to a certain extent, a reflection of how a speech community interprets reality. The choice of words, syntactic structure, stress and even lexical deficit give us subtle clues about the history of a culture, the evolution of which we can observe over time. An obvious example is that of swear words.
Cultures in close and forced contact with Christianity and other similar religions coined numerous curse words related to sacred entities or elements of the liturgy. In general, they alluded to what was prohibited in order to unleash the feelings that often accompany the use of these expressions. The truth is that the sacred texts themselves punish certain language use. Where it says “Non assumes nomen Domini Dei tui in vanum”, the speaker saw the opportunity to cause offense. On the other hand, in countries beyond the reach of this influence, sexual and eschatological references prevailed, and they did not spread among the latter until the time of the Renaissance, when attention turned away from God and towards humankind. Today, the expressive function of swear words is so important in interpersonal communication that there is a wide range of lexical choices available to us, with a mix of different origins.
Over the last few years, and moving away from the fascination caused by these types of words, many societies from around the world have seen increased interest in so-called inclusive language. Many speakers, with greater or lesser experience in linguistics and communication, realized that our turns of phrase or word choices had a negative or derogatory connotation towards certain groups, or seemingly excluded them. A well-known example in Spanish is that of people with disabilities, who until recently were referred to using euphemisms with plenty of room for improvement. At the time, the term “minusválido” was chosen because the coldness perceived from Greek and Latin affixes seemed to mean the same thing, but with greater sensitivity, when the truth is that, etymologically, it implies that they are people who are “less valid” than others. This is why there has been a recent shift towards, in more general terms, talking about people “with disabilities” or “functional diversity”, though there is no shortage of critics. When talking about a specific disability, it is common to accurately refer to things by their name (e.g. a person can be deaf, mute or deaf-mute, but we can’t use the term “deaf-mute” just because the person doesn’t talk; they may have healthy vocal cords, but never learnt to articulate because they were born deaf).
These considerations are incredibly interesting to observe over time in different communities and they apply to a wide variety of fields. For example, to age, socio-economic class and, without a doubt, to racial diversity. We recommend reading this article, which provides examples in English related to these issues, and think about what happens in other languages.
However, it is undeniable that one of the areas currently receiving the most interest is that of gender studies. This has come about after different communities revealed that many languages use lexical forms that give women less protagonism or makes them less visible since, in the majority of languages with gender variation, the generic masculine gender is used. Although some people argue that this differentiation between the masculine, feminine and neutral gender follows a grammatical rule that did not intend to attribute strictly “masculine” or “feminine” qualities (a social construct to be discussed at a later date) to words, the truth is that many people feel that using words or expressions applying the generic masculine can negatively affect the visibility and inclusion of women. This has led the different communities to set out a series of proposals in order to use more inclusive language.
In Spanish, the most successful initiative has been the use of collective nouns that encompass both sexes, or better yet, that do not differentiate between them. “Alumnos” and “alumnas” [students] are now referred to as “el alumnado” [student body], “hombre” [men] and “mujeres” [women] are collectively referred to as “personas” [people] or “seres humanos” [human beings], “enfermeros” and “enfermeras” [nurses] now form part of the “personal de enfermería” [nursing staff], and “chicos” [boys] and “chicas” [girls] can be defined as “la juventud” [young people] in certain contexts. Similarly, many words with no gender variation are used with modifiers in which the gender is alternated using a slash, such as “los/as estudiantes” [the students]. This technique is fairly widespread to indicate gender (e.g. “los/las profesionales sanitarios/as” [health professionals]), but in practice it can compromise text length if used extensively. These options coexist to a greater or lesser extent in oral and written language. However, there are many other proposals in Spanish that work for written text, but not for spoken language. This is the case of “@” or “x” to hide gender information, e.g. ”almun@s”, “chicxs”, “emplead@s” or “amigxs”. It’s use in spoken language, in addition to being limited to colloquial registers, needs more complex formulas. Lastly, there is the option of using the morpheme “-e” to replace the traditional oes and aes, but speakers and linguistic authorities continue to perceive it as peculiar.
As for English, which formally does not differentiate by grammatical gender, there has been a shift towards replacing the pronouns “he” and “she” (and their derivatives) with the plural form “they”, which takes on a singular meaning with unspecified gender. Although many may find the use of this word for both grammatical numbers confusing, it was used at the time when Shakespeare and Jane Austen were writing, so it is not a strange formula for the language.
In the same vein, languages like Swedish have applied similar proposals. In 2015, its official dictionary added hen as a neutral personal pronoun, an invention that aimed to act as a bridge between the masculine han and the feminine hon. It has received great support not only from feminist and LGBT collectives, but also from staff working in kindergarden and primary schools who have joined the cause having realized that it is a way of providing a less biased education in terms of gender.
In January 2019, the city of Hanover became the first German city to order all official communications (emails, leaflets, forms, etc.) to use gender-neutral forms. For example, instead of using wähler for male voters and wählerin for female voters, it was decided that the word wählende should be used, which translates loosely as “someone who votes”.
In France, a feminist movement proposed the use of asterisks to break down words and separate the flexive gender morpheme from the root word, such as ami·e·s for friends.
Without a doubt, inclusive language is making headway in different speech communities. Although many of the forms currently in use many not endure, it seems that languages are evolving towards a version that brings to the fore groups that were traditionally under-represented. In fact, many language service providers are already providing clients with translations that use this language. Who knows, maybe this will become a new niche market.
We used the following articles to help write this entry:
- https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/12/15/guide-how-gender-neutral-language-is-developing-around-world/
- https://veracontent.com/mix/inclusive-language-examples/
