Cancelled

(Nearly) every noun in Spanish has a neutral “gender”.
Some words have male neutral and some have female neutral.

The neutral gender doesn’t imply assigning actual gender to the noun being discussed or written about.

You use the neutral gender when you don’t know the gender being addressed or when you are talking about mixed genders.

There is no English equivalent to gendered nouns. That is a cause for confusion.

Thanks everyone, for native speaker clarifications about gendered/neutral nouns. Erik, I guess my resistance to your justifications for effectively maintaining a linguistic status quo as "taking into account how people speak" (I'm sorry if I'm misrepresenting that argument) is maybe due to a lack of nuance on my part in understanding the possibilities of reform or political resistance through modifications of linguistic norms.

I brought up the older academic inertia about political correctness because this was a time in my life (as a naive freshman undergrad) when I took notice of a couple of patterns in these more status quo, “allow the language to shift organically” types of arguments.

What first struck me was that there always seemed to be a self-contradiction in the attitude that our approach to changing language was somehow very important and delicate (and shouldn’t be bludgeoned into discourse artificially), yet that this importance and care about changing gendered language itself shouldn’t be of concern to those gendered bodies that were acculturated to speak it.

Again, I’m probably betraying lack of nuance here, but this strikes me as a very similar power dynamic to the language of colonizers subsuming the linguistic agency of the colonized: the latter are acculturated, through institutions and other applications of power over time, to adopt the language of the colonizer as transparent, benign, merely representational in the arbitrary “apolitical,” “socially consensual” way that all languages ostensibly are.

I understand that there are obvious differences in power dynamics, but that general pattern is really difficult for me to unsee, to the point where I’m sometimes baffled at arguments that look at linguistic cases where “male” is the a-specific default indicator for a human being while female is the subset and basically adopting a stance that there isn’t any power dynamic at play in that setup, and even if there were, that we should simply “make do” with the language as it is rather than make any effort to go against the political grain of what I can only perceive as a civilization-spanning act of colonizing/subjugating specific genders, while insisting that their representational tools and speech are perfectly fine. Something seems off to me about that argument, like it’s being spoken from a vantage that is more likely situated in that “default” position of power, rather than those who've been told over centuries to see themselves through a lens of implicit gender translation (he = he/she/they) instead of straight up representation.

The fact that this discussion is being held in one language but about another is a power dynamic all its own. Whatever we have to say about gender representation in Spanish is likely pretty unimportant compared to what's been said in it about this topic.

Absolutely, but I’m also grateful that the discussion is taking place. It’s made me rethink some of my assumptions, and I’m learning (I hope).

These patient and nuanced replies have made me look a bit deeper, particularly re: the usage of Latinx, which I would have just gone trundling forward assuming it was a newly adopted, non-problematically inclusive term. This apparently isn’t the case.

Interesting article here (sorry if there’s a paywall):

www.nytimes.com/2018/11/21/style/latinx-...r-nonconforming.html

mads b. wrote: I think it's fairly non-controversial to say that the fact that male is the default gender in our languages is obviously [...] because men have historically been seen as the default gender and have also been the gender with rights.

This is an appealing thought, but it's not accepted from a linguisitic perspective. Note that Latin had a neutral gender before it evolved into Romance languages.

This is actually one of the biggest problems with the feminist perspective. It's not supported by historical or linguisitic evidence and its biggest supporters do not have the necessary background to make the claims they do. Most importantly, Whorfism (The idea that language affects the world view of its speakers) is not accepted in linguistics and most research in the topic has been questioned.

My mother, who is a Spanish Philologist and speaks both Latin and Classical Greek does not agree with these views. Neither do any significant linguists or experts on language. And I don't think it's because they are unable to see sexism. She thinks there's sexism in the language- like do all academy members - but she does not agree with the claims on grammatical gender.

Frohike wrote: I’m sometimes baffled at arguments that look at linguistic cases where “male” is the a-specific default indicator for a human being while female is the subset

To me it's no more of a subset than the plural is the subset of the singular. To me this is the key disagreement. The value judgment of women is not in the "indicator" but in the meaning, in what we actually say.

Here's the thing, while I only speak two and a half, I've studied five different languages. And I've never found the sexism of its speakers was related to the structure of the language itself. The lack of gender in English doesn't make it any more or less sexist than Spanish. In fact, the more I've studied the more absurd the whole idea seems to be. Why is a potato female? Why is a sister neutral in German? To me the meanings are so far away from their grammar that I cannot agree with these views.

At the end of the day, sexism is meant, not written.

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I cannot read your article Frohike. Most American newspapers block European users because they don't want to stop harvesting our data.

Why is a sister neutral in German?

I won't join in this discussion. Clarification:
The German word 'Schwester' means 'Sister' and is grammatically female. I suppose you were referring to the word 'Geschwister'. That one is neutral and means 'sibling'.

One of the problems of having this discussion is that gender in language can both mean the way we refer to people (like chairman being the default for chairperson) and grammatical gender. What I'm talking about is the prior, not the latter.

Also, I'm not saying that language creates oppression (though the way we talk about minorities can obviously help justify it). What I am saying is that language and language conventions can be excluding in a way that a minority (I'm including women here) might want to change because they don't feel represented. And that this exclusion can be very real is, I think, obvious from the fact that you only use one gendered (not grammatically) version of words to refer to both men and women and not the other.

Interesting issues brought up by Concepción de León in the article, which I'll quote here since it's unfortunately gated/paywalled:

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So, should it be used at all?

Linguists have mixed feelings.

Kim Potowski, a professor at the University of Illinois who specializes in Spanish linguistics, tried to employ inclusive language in a forthcoming Spanish grammar book, but replacing the masculine “O” throughout overwhelmed her and her co-writer, Naomi L. Shin. “It came to a point where we said, ‘You know what, we’re not ready,’” she said. Maybe in the fourth or fifth edition of the book, she added, “we will have those X’s in there.”

“There is absolutely no consensus among linguists,” said Dr. Potowski.

Another scholar, Lourdes Torres, a professor of Latino studies at DePaul University in Chicago, argues that the word Latinx undermines hard-fought feminist battles. “In its attempt to be gender-inclusive,” she said, “one can argue that it’s gender-erasing of women who have fought for a long time to not just have Latino, but to have Latino/Latina, to make sure women are represented.”

But they do agree that language evolves with the culture.

“As social factors change, sometimes the language has to change,” said Dr. Torres. “The people who use the language are the ones who determine what it is.” She and Dr. Potowski both gave words like “presidenta” or “jefa” as examples; neither existed until women entered the work force and took on those roles.

Ed Morales, a Columbia University professor who wrote “Latinx: The New Force in American Politics and Culture,” agrees. In a recent conversation he said that “the X, which is so strange and is not Spanish, sort of marks this new hybrid idea.” The title of his book, similarly, was meant to be forward-looking. “I thought it was a futurist term,” he said, “imagining a future of more inclusion for people that don’t conform to the various kinds of rigid identities that exist in the United States.”

Still, the arbiter of Spanish is the Real Academia Española. That entity decides which words make it into the dictionary, and they’re not big fans of Spanglish or Spanish words developed in the United States. In 2012, they added a definition for “estadounidismo,” which translates to Americanism. At first, Dr. Torres said, the word was categorized as a “deformation of Spanish.” Linguists had to push for them to change the official entry.

Dialectical hierarchy is nothing new. Dominicans and Puerto Ricans, for instance, are criticized for dropping word endings or using inventive slang. It’s significant that the Real Academia recognized American Spanish in its pages, but why is it widely perceived as being less valid than the Spanish dialects spoken in other countries?

Because American Spanish is for the youth.

Many young, American Latinos believe that Spain’s official ruling on language erases our African and indigenous roots in favor of European values. Some have argued that Latinx is partly a nod to the gender fluidity that existed among Natives before colonization.

Spanish is the second most spoken language in the United States, and many Hispanic adults feel that it is important for their succeeding generations to keep the language alive in this country. Inevitably, though, new words that meld Spanish and English will be introduced.

Both Dr. Morales and Dr. Torres said feminist and queer circles in Latin America are experimenting with their own terms. “We’re not creating this change in Latin America,” Dr. Torres said. “They recognize that their language, like all languages, is sexist. All languages are sexist because we live under the patriarchy everywhere.”

The value of the X is that it “provokes conversation about who we’re including and who we’re not including in our communities,” she said. But that doesn’t mean everybody has to use it.

“If you talk to my dad or my tía, that’s just another silly academic or political thing,” Dr. Torres said. “It’s definitely of a certain world.”

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So much complexity at play here: intersectional complexity, generational tension, continental dynamics with the Royal Spanish Academy, etc. Even its reputed origin as an estadounidismo is... not so straightforward.

ubarose wrote: PS in American English Latino/Latina/Latinx implies that the person is American, and has the ethnic or cultural heritage of one of the Hispanic countries in the Americas. We wouldn’t say that Erik is Latino. We would say that he is a Spaniard. It he was an American, he might self identify as a Spanish-American.

They would be considered Hispanic, though.