Existence Of Sexism In The Spanish Language

Existence of sexism in the Spanish language

Introduction

The objective of this work is to make an analysis of the possible existence of sexism in the Spanish language. Is the sexist language or is the use made of it? 

This work includes different arguments, claims of a more inclusive use in the language and position of the SAR. In addition, the controversial use of the generic male and its origin is investigated. 

Developing

From Latin to current Spanish

Let’s see how the grammatical genre has arrived at our times and process by which Latin genres were reduced and how they evolved to the current Spanish.

Latin suffered a series of phonetic and syntactic changes, so that of the five declines of the written Latin there were three in the vulgar Latin. In this way, as Juan Noriega and Miguel Ángel Forascepi point out, the female nouns ended in -a, the male and neutrals assimilated in -o and a series of male, feminine and neutral were left, ended in a vowel different from -a, -o or inconsonant. 

According to Wandersleben Werner G (1979), for the confusion of the ends in male -um with the neutral -us, they melted in one and the neutral genre ended up losing. This resulted in a redistribution of neutral gender nouns, some of them to be male and other female, sometimes it was arbitrarily assigned. In Spanish, there are only remains of the neutral, such as article "lo" or demonstratives this, that, that.

The criterion of this redistribution, according to Ralph Penny in the historical grammar of Spanish was as follows: “If the Latin noun had a vowel in its final syllable was included among the male, while those neutrals that evolved from its plural form (in/-A/) acquired the female gender ".

Linguistic sexism

Since the end of the eighties, the existence of linguistic sexism has been denounced and has resulted in two positions: on the one hand, there are those who want to highlight the sexist nature of the language and also correct it to be more egalitarian, on the other hand, those who believe that these arguments lack the foundation and that the language must follow the linguistic norms, in this group is the Royal Academy of Language. 

Ana María Portal Nieto affirms the following:

We understand as products of linguistic sexism those messages that due to their linguistic expression are discriminatory due to sex. It has been divided into two large blocks, in the lexicon: treatments, names and surnames, the man’s voice to refer to human race, professions, tacos and insults, jokes, sayings, etc.

Álvaro García Meseguer distinguishes between linguistic and social sexism. The first refers to the chosen words, while in the second type what is discriminatory is the message. In addition, it supposes:

Although unprovable, it is not risky to assume that who first baptized the grammatical genres with the male and female adjectives, did so thinking that the first was typical of a male and the second of the woman. From this moment on and taking into account that the male has been until recentgeneric and specific, given the universal principle of linguistic economy.

Grammatical genre and extensive use of generic male.

The male grammatical genre is the unmarked genre and has double use (it serves to designate male individuals and also the whole species without distinction of sexes) and the female is the marked genre.

This double function of the male gender is denounced by those who demand a use of the most equal language and denounce that to use the plural in masculine the existence of the woman is hidden.

Calero Fernández maintains:

The problem is not posed by the fact that a language possesses genres such as feminine and masculine and as it was understood in the Indo-European-, that is, because there are linguistic elements that separately designate women (or females) andmale (or males), but the conflict occurs, on the one hand, having granted the generic value to one of the two (to which it represented the socially dominant group) giving it globalizing and universal value and making the other something exclusiveand exceptional;and, on the other hand, because when the female is built from the masculine, he acquires a connotation of dependency with respect to this. Something that served to designate sex (natural reality) ends up pointing status (cultural reality). 

Posture of the Royal Spanish Academy

The Academy has published a document in which it says that it is cleaning its dictionary of sexist definitions, which are caused by society or culture. With this cleaning it is replacing definitions, such as the voice "man" by "person", eliminating words with negative connotations and correcting tickets whose meaning was "woman of".

The truth is that the Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy continues to contain numerous sexist definitions, Álvaro García Meseguer does not blame the SAR of these meanings “The dictionary is not to blame, since it only reflects the speech facts. What can be censored to the dictionary is that when defining use words that are sexists ”. 

Confusion between gender and sex

In the report of the Royal Spanish Academy on inclusive language and related issues, they insist that "it is necessary to differentiate between the grammatical genre and the semantic genre (which shows oppositions of content, including sex)" "".

Guides for the use of non -sexist language

Aware that numerous institutions and organisms can be improved, such as UNESCO, have made guides for the use of non -sexist language. 

The Women’s Institute has published a compilation of 120 guides in response to the measures of the II Plan for Equality between Women and Men. You can access online for free. They have been classified thematically and tidy alphabetically by entity and with the links to their website for consultation.

The Cervantes Institute ensures that its guide is not a code or a standard, but what it intends is to recommend, present options to minimize discriminatory elements that due to ignorance or habit appear in communication.

Some strategies that have been proposed in several guides to avoid sexist language are:

• Change of prayer structure to avoid the use of generic male.
• Use of neutral gender expressions;for example: "human beings" instead of "men".
• Use of female and masculine unfolding.
• Add a bar to reflect both the male and female gender.

These guides have caused the criticisms of the Royal Spanish Academy, in the known as ‘Forest Report’, Ignacio Bosque in this report, signed by all number academics, criticize that they are made without the intervention of linguists and adds:

There is a general agreement between the linguists in which the useless (or generic) use of the masculine to designate the two sexes is firmly settled in the Spanish grammatical system, as is in that of many other Romanesque and non -Romanesque languages, and alsoin which there is no reason to censor it. Ignacio Bosque, 2012, linguistic sexism and visibility of women (p. 6 

Conclusions

Current society is not reflected in some obsolete aspects of the language. DRAE is an institution that evolves, we do not speak as in the 197? 

The language has numerous resources that are at our disposal to avoid incurring linguistic sexism, the Royal Spanish Academy maintains, in which certain expressions are not corrected by improving grammar, but through education, and for this it would be essential to change habitsacquired since childhood, change, by habit, the way of using our language. 

On the other hand, despite the fact that the Royal Spanish Academy defends the language as non -sexist, criticizes and slows the introduction or elimination of words, its criticisms protected by linguistic norms that were devised by men in a social context very different from the current one from the current. The application of the linguistic law, of the expressive economy, as well as the possibility of referring to mixed groups through the masculine generic, should not be a wall to implement another type of more equal language according to current society.

References

• Calero Fernández, M. A. (1999). Linguistic sexism: analysis and proposals to sexual discrimination in language. Narcea.
• García Meseguer, to. (2001). Is the Spanish language sexist? [Email Protected], 2 (3), 20-34. Obtained from Spanish linguistics studies.
• García Meseguer, to. (November 23, 2002). The Spanish language is not sexist, they are the speakers themselves and listeners. The opinion.
• Noriega, J., & Forascepi, M. A. (2001). The genre in Spanish. Nadatur.
• Penny, r. (2014). Historical Spanish grammar. Ariel Letters.
• Nieto portal, to. M. (1999). Grammatical genre and linguistic sexism. Asele, (pp. 551-558).
• Royal Spanish Academy. (2020). Report of the Royal Spanish Academy about inclusive language and related issues.