If something needs to be recognized to politicians, it is their creativity with language. In the 2012 crisis, they said that there were no cuts but adjustments and that a tax increase was a temporary solidarity surcharge. Now you only need to see some watermarks of the political class to avoid sexist language: talk about users instead of users, or those who study instead of students. These are not random examples, but are included in the guide approved in December by the Bureau of Congress to eliminate sexism from parliamentary language. There are fifteen pages with alternative proposals to words and expressions in current use that have prompted a harsh response from the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE), which comes out in defense of the language and reprimands the authors of the guide.
In its response, the RAE warns that “no progress is made in achieving the democratic equality of men and women by artificially forcing the grammar and lexicon of the Spanish language, but by arbitrating legislative measures that lead to equalization of rights”.
In addition, he points out that the guide “raises a disjunctive” in that it draws up recommendations only for Congress and implies “that speakers who do not apply the resources exposed are expressing themselves in sexist language.” In this way, “the everyday language of the majority of the millions of Spanish speakers would be sexist”, including parliamentarians when they are not speaking from the podium of Congress. A disjunctive that “hides the implicit desire to increase the distance” between “the official universe and the real world”, he adds.
The text of the Congress recommends avoiding an “excessive use” of the “generic masculine” and refraining from using expressions containing the indefinite masculine (instead of “about two thousand attendees”, say “approximately two thousand… “), asks to attribute nouns (“user people” instead of “users”), split nouns (“senators and senators”) and prioritize terms that do not present gender variation (instead of “several speakers will take part” say ” different will intervene…”), among other issues.
“The editors of the text do not seem to care that the substitute expression is extremely forced for any Spanish speaker”, criticizes the Academy, which emphasizes that “the use of this substitute resource” can modify “considerably” the meaning of the that you want to express.
However, according to the RAE, “the most conflicting point” of the manual is the interpretation of the so-called “inclusive male”, on which “fundamental discrepancies” persist. He points out that “the masculine gender is inclusive (in Spanish and in many other languages) in a large number of contexts” and that “the fact that it is not in some cases should not lead to the absurd conclusion that it is never “. At the same time, he points out the “paradox” that supposes that the same document talks about “replacing it”, but at the same time asks “to avoid excessive use”.
The Academy emphasizes that societies in which languages ??are spoken that organize the morphological properties of gender in a different way, as well as concordance samples, “are not necessarily more democratic than ours”.
But not everything is criticism. The RAE applauds that the Congress recommends to the deputies – men and women deputies – to avoid the arrova as a wild card for the vowels o and a (“l@s parlamentari@s”), or letters like e (“les parlamentarias”) in similar contexts. “It represents a considerable advance”, he celebrates.
