Social Issues
A Language for All
Un lenguaje para todas
Teens in Argentina are leading the charge to eliminate gender in language
By Samantha Schmidt
DECEMBER 5, 2019
[Lee este artículo en español]
BUENOS AIRES — As hundreds of teenagers flooded the dimly lit street for the student government rally, 18-year-old Natalia Mira raised her hand in the air and led them in a chant.
It was a song often heard among young people at political rallies in Buenos Aires, an ode to a former Argentine president, the populist Juan Perón, and his wife, Eva.
“We will fight from sun to sun,” they sang in front of their high school. “We are the youth, the soldiers of Perón.”
In Spanish, a language in which all nouns are assigned a gender, the word for soldiers is masculine: “Los soldados de Perón.”
The lyrics Mira sang were different: “Les soldades.”
To most Spanish speakers, the “e” in both words would sound jarring — and grammatically incorrect.
But here, teenagers are rewriting the rules of the language to eliminate gender. In classrooms and daily conversations, young people are changing the way they speak and write — replacing the masculine “o” or the feminine “a” with the gender-neutral “e” in certain words — in order to change what they see as a deeply gendered culture.
adopted its use as a pronoun for non-binary people. In France, a school textbook promoting a gender-neutral version of French prompted the prime minister to ban the form in all official government documents. In Germany, dozens of influential figures protested local efforts to adopt gender-neutral language.
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The fight for a gender-neutral Spanish
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In Argentina, Mira’s casual use of gender-neutral language in a television interview helped it spread across the country. Now the new form of grammar is finding official acceptance.
Departments from at least five universities across Argentina have announced that they will accept the use of this “inclusive” Spanish in schoolwork. The gender-neutral words are splattered on banners and campaign fliers and graffiti in the capital. After a judge stirred controversy by using the form in a recent court decision, an oversight committee of magistrates declared that it is now permissible for judges to use the gender-neutral words.
Books have been translated into the gender-neutral Spanish, including a version of “The Little Prince.” The form has reached Spanish speakers in the United States, prompting discussions in university language programs.
Just weeks before he became Argentina’s president-elect, Alberto Fernández used it publicly in a speech to high school students. And the new form was appearing in WhatsApp messages and Instagram posts as thousands, including Mira, prepared to go to the largest annual gathering of women in Argentine history, on a weekend in early October.
But eliminating gender in Spanish, a language spoken by more than 577 millionpeople worldwide, is not as simple as adopting a gender-neutral pronoun. The Royal Spanish Academy, the preeminent authority on the centuries-old language, has said that such grammatical changes, are “unnecessary and artificial.” To many Spanish speakers, the gender-neutral form is an aberration.
The language form has divided the feminist movement from which it originated. While some within the movement insist on speaking in a way that includes non-binary people, others have resisted, preferring to emphasize the voices of women by using feminine words. Others wonder if it’s even worth trying to change the language — would it make a difference?
But as Mira and her friends chanted at their rally, the gender-neutral form was everywhere — in the songs they had memorized, on the banners strung from the marble building behind them.
found evidence that “grammatical gender” has a negative causal impact on female labor force participation.
And a recent study of speakers in Sweden, where the gender-neutral pronoun “hen” was added to the official Swedish dictionary in 2015, found that adopting the non-binary pronoun was associated with more favorable attitudes toward women and the LGBTQ community.
While changes in vocabulary happen fairly often, the grammar of a language rarely changes, said Paz Battaner, a lexicographer and member of the Royal Spanish Academy. It’s not impossible for the gender-neutral form of Spanish to someday become so common that the academy accepts it, she said. “But I doubt it.”
Mira believed that if she used gender-neutral Spanish in her own daily life, others might too. She started using it with friends, with her parents, with taxi drivers — even when she sang to herself in the kitchen. By the time a broadcast journalist interviewed her in front of her school in June last year, the words slipped out naturally.
At the time, lawmakers in the country were preparing to vote on a bill legalizing abortion, drawing massive crowds of young women to plazas and campuses wearing the green bandannas symbolizing the abortion rights movement.
Mira had been demonstrating in favor of the bill with her classmates when the broadcast journalist approached her. Pressed about the vote, Mira urged lawmakers not to go down in history as “those who let hundreds of women and hundreds of pregnant bodies continue to die” as a result of clandestine abortions.
And throughout the interview, she casually used gender-neutral words. As Mira spoke, the journalist, Eduardo Feinmann, kept interrupting to correct her.
“My way is Spanish. I don’t know what yours is,” the journalist fired back.
Argentine teen berated on TV after using gender-neutral words during interview
The confrontation made headlines across Argentina and the Spanish-speaking world, marking the first time the gender-neutral language had emerged in many mainstream news outlets. The viral video turned Mira into the punchline of jokes, the subject of attacks. To conservative Argentines, she represented the radical left, the feminists who want to legalize abortion, the teenagers who want to disrupt society.
A former teacher went as far as to post a meme on Facebook, picturing Mira holding a gun and using gender-neutral Spanish to make a crude sexual joke. “Enough with the feminazis,” he wrote.
The attacks frightened her parents, who filed a complaint against the teacher with the prosecutor’s office. But Mira’s activism has changed the way they see the Spanish language, and the world around them.
“I began to question … why do we always say ‘señores y señoras?’ ” said her mother, Norma Otero, 63, who now occasionally calls her students “chiques” in the private Catholic school where she teaches. “Why are we always last?”
A banner uses the "x," as in the now commonly used "Latinx," in its demand for labor rights for sex workers.
Electrical plugs are offered for "todxs" — using "x" instead of the "o" or "a" — in the Spanish word for "all."
The new form of Spanish has been slowly spreading, especially in Buenos Aires, a socially progressive capital city like Washington.
Less than a mile from Mira’s family’s apartment in Buenos Aires, the owner of a used book store said he has been rethinking the Spanish language ever since his teenage niece began teaching him the gender-neutral form.
“Language is not something that always has to remain the same,” said the owner, Darío Del Rio, 44.
About six miles west, in the Villa Santa Rita neighborhood, Laura Soto Moreno, a 31-year-old college professor, is teaching her 3-year-old son how to use the “e” form. He now calls his friends “mis amigues” and his cousins “mis primes.”
“I want him to understand that feminism is a way of life” and that gender is fluid, Soto Moreno said.
But in other, more conservative circles in Buenos Aires, the language form is seen as absurd.
“It’s absolutely ridiculous,” said Salvador Ugarte, a 65-year-old retired veterinarian, as he walked his dog in a park in Belgrano, a leafy residential neighborhood in the northern part of the capital. Only two genders exist, and such gender-neutral language is only used by leftist, “lower-class” people, he said.
His friend Hernan Semprum, a 77-year-old Venezuelan law professor who has lived in Argentina for 10 years, argued it is essential to preserve the purity of the Spanish language. “It is what truly unites all of the countries” in the Spanish-speaking world, he said.
first Latin American country to legalize same-sex marriage nationwide. She was 11 when the country passed a gender identity law allowing trans people to change their legal name and gender marker. She was 14 when the brutal killing of a 14-year-old girl prompted hundreds of thousands of women to march across Argentina, and later Latin America, to protest the high murder rates of women, using the hashtag #NiUnaMenos, #NotOneLess.
Now, just weeks before a national presidential election, Mira was about to join many of those same activists for the 34th annual “Encuentro Nacional de Las Mujeres,” or National Gathering of Women, held this year in La Plata, about an hour from Buenos Aires.
The weekend, expected to draw more than 200,000 women, would be filled with workshops and marches focused on women’s rights — and gender-neutral language would be a central topic of debate.
the newsthat Argentina’s president, Mauricio Macri, had compared his rivals’ economic policies to placing a wife in charge of a house’s finances. “Instead of paying the bills, she used your credit card,” he said.
Mira shook her head as she pointed out the news story to Sanchez, sitting next to her at her dining room table. Then she closed out of the Web page and took a sip of mate, changing the subject.
A mother, but not a woman]
[‘If not us, who will?’]
[Is a crop top empowering for girls? How parents navigate what’s ‘appropriate’ for high school.]
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A Language for All
Un lenguaje para todas
Teens in Argentina are leading the charge to eliminate gender in language
By Samantha Schmidt
DECEMBER 5, 2019
[Lee este artículo en español]
BUENOS AIRES — As hundreds of teenagers flooded the dimly lit street for the student government rally, 18-year-old Natalia Mira raised her hand in the air and led them in a chant.
It was a song often heard among young people at political rallies in Buenos Aires, an ode to a former Argentine president, the populist Juan Perón, and his wife, Eva.
“We will fight from sun to sun,” they sang in front of their high school. “We are the youth, the soldiers of Perón.”
In Spanish, a language in which all nouns are assigned a gender, the word for soldiers is masculine: “Los soldados de Perón.”
The lyrics Mira sang were different: “Les soldades.”
To most Spanish speakers, the “e” in both words would sound jarring — and grammatically incorrect.
But here, teenagers are rewriting the rules of the language to eliminate gender. In classrooms and daily conversations, young people are changing the way they speak and write — replacing the masculine “o” or the feminine “a” with the gender-neutral “e” in certain words — in order to change what they see as a deeply gendered culture.
adopted its use as a pronoun for non-binary people. In France, a school textbook promoting a gender-neutral version of French prompted the prime minister to ban the form in all official government documents. In Germany, dozens of influential figures protested local efforts to adopt gender-neutral language.
Subscribe on:
Alexa Apple PodcastsGoogle Podcasts Spotify Stitcher TuneInRadioPublic iHeartRadio RSS
Post Reports | Podcast
The fight for a gender-neutral Spanish
Subscribe
0:00
15
15
20:26
In Argentina, Mira’s casual use of gender-neutral language in a television interview helped it spread across the country. Now the new form of grammar is finding official acceptance.
Departments from at least five universities across Argentina have announced that they will accept the use of this “inclusive” Spanish in schoolwork. The gender-neutral words are splattered on banners and campaign fliers and graffiti in the capital. After a judge stirred controversy by using the form in a recent court decision, an oversight committee of magistrates declared that it is now permissible for judges to use the gender-neutral words.
Books have been translated into the gender-neutral Spanish, including a version of “The Little Prince.” The form has reached Spanish speakers in the United States, prompting discussions in university language programs.
Just weeks before he became Argentina’s president-elect, Alberto Fernández used it publicly in a speech to high school students. And the new form was appearing in WhatsApp messages and Instagram posts as thousands, including Mira, prepared to go to the largest annual gathering of women in Argentine history, on a weekend in early October.
But eliminating gender in Spanish, a language spoken by more than 577 millionpeople worldwide, is not as simple as adopting a gender-neutral pronoun. The Royal Spanish Academy, the preeminent authority on the centuries-old language, has said that such grammatical changes, are “unnecessary and artificial.” To many Spanish speakers, the gender-neutral form is an aberration.
The language form has divided the feminist movement from which it originated. While some within the movement insist on speaking in a way that includes non-binary people, others have resisted, preferring to emphasize the voices of women by using feminine words. Others wonder if it’s even worth trying to change the language — would it make a difference?
But as Mira and her friends chanted at their rally, the gender-neutral form was everywhere — in the songs they had memorized, on the banners strung from the marble building behind them.
found evidence that “grammatical gender” has a negative causal impact on female labor force participation.
And a recent study of speakers in Sweden, where the gender-neutral pronoun “hen” was added to the official Swedish dictionary in 2015, found that adopting the non-binary pronoun was associated with more favorable attitudes toward women and the LGBTQ community.
While changes in vocabulary happen fairly often, the grammar of a language rarely changes, said Paz Battaner, a lexicographer and member of the Royal Spanish Academy. It’s not impossible for the gender-neutral form of Spanish to someday become so common that the academy accepts it, she said. “But I doubt it.”
Mira believed that if she used gender-neutral Spanish in her own daily life, others might too. She started using it with friends, with her parents, with taxi drivers — even when she sang to herself in the kitchen. By the time a broadcast journalist interviewed her in front of her school in June last year, the words slipped out naturally.
At the time, lawmakers in the country were preparing to vote on a bill legalizing abortion, drawing massive crowds of young women to plazas and campuses wearing the green bandannas symbolizing the abortion rights movement.
Mira had been demonstrating in favor of the bill with her classmates when the broadcast journalist approached her. Pressed about the vote, Mira urged lawmakers not to go down in history as “those who let hundreds of women and hundreds of pregnant bodies continue to die” as a result of clandestine abortions.
And throughout the interview, she casually used gender-neutral words. As Mira spoke, the journalist, Eduardo Feinmann, kept interrupting to correct her.
“My way is Spanish. I don’t know what yours is,” the journalist fired back.
Argentine teen berated on TV after using gender-neutral words during interview
The confrontation made headlines across Argentina and the Spanish-speaking world, marking the first time the gender-neutral language had emerged in many mainstream news outlets. The viral video turned Mira into the punchline of jokes, the subject of attacks. To conservative Argentines, she represented the radical left, the feminists who want to legalize abortion, the teenagers who want to disrupt society.
A former teacher went as far as to post a meme on Facebook, picturing Mira holding a gun and using gender-neutral Spanish to make a crude sexual joke. “Enough with the feminazis,” he wrote.
The attacks frightened her parents, who filed a complaint against the teacher with the prosecutor’s office. But Mira’s activism has changed the way they see the Spanish language, and the world around them.
“I began to question … why do we always say ‘señores y señoras?’ ” said her mother, Norma Otero, 63, who now occasionally calls her students “chiques” in the private Catholic school where she teaches. “Why are we always last?”
A banner uses the "x," as in the now commonly used "Latinx," in its demand for labor rights for sex workers.
Electrical plugs are offered for "todxs" — using "x" instead of the "o" or "a" — in the Spanish word for "all."
The new form of Spanish has been slowly spreading, especially in Buenos Aires, a socially progressive capital city like Washington.
Less than a mile from Mira’s family’s apartment in Buenos Aires, the owner of a used book store said he has been rethinking the Spanish language ever since his teenage niece began teaching him the gender-neutral form.
“Language is not something that always has to remain the same,” said the owner, Darío Del Rio, 44.
About six miles west, in the Villa Santa Rita neighborhood, Laura Soto Moreno, a 31-year-old college professor, is teaching her 3-year-old son how to use the “e” form. He now calls his friends “mis amigues” and his cousins “mis primes.”
“I want him to understand that feminism is a way of life” and that gender is fluid, Soto Moreno said.
But in other, more conservative circles in Buenos Aires, the language form is seen as absurd.
“It’s absolutely ridiculous,” said Salvador Ugarte, a 65-year-old retired veterinarian, as he walked his dog in a park in Belgrano, a leafy residential neighborhood in the northern part of the capital. Only two genders exist, and such gender-neutral language is only used by leftist, “lower-class” people, he said.
His friend Hernan Semprum, a 77-year-old Venezuelan law professor who has lived in Argentina for 10 years, argued it is essential to preserve the purity of the Spanish language. “It is what truly unites all of the countries” in the Spanish-speaking world, he said.
first Latin American country to legalize same-sex marriage nationwide. She was 11 when the country passed a gender identity law allowing trans people to change their legal name and gender marker. She was 14 when the brutal killing of a 14-year-old girl prompted hundreds of thousands of women to march across Argentina, and later Latin America, to protest the high murder rates of women, using the hashtag #NiUnaMenos, #NotOneLess.
Now, just weeks before a national presidential election, Mira was about to join many of those same activists for the 34th annual “Encuentro Nacional de Las Mujeres,” or National Gathering of Women, held this year in La Plata, about an hour from Buenos Aires.
The weekend, expected to draw more than 200,000 women, would be filled with workshops and marches focused on women’s rights — and gender-neutral language would be a central topic of debate.
the newsthat Argentina’s president, Mauricio Macri, had compared his rivals’ economic policies to placing a wife in charge of a house’s finances. “Instead of paying the bills, she used your credit card,” he said.
Mira shook her head as she pointed out the news story to Sanchez, sitting next to her at her dining room table. Then she closed out of the Web page and took a sip of mate, changing the subject.
A mother, but not a woman]
[‘If not us, who will?’]
[Is a crop top empowering for girls? How parents navigate what’s ‘appropriate’ for high school.]
Sign in to join the conversation
