What is the future of inclusive language? – 26/03/2019

The Spanish Vice President, Carmen Calvo, had, at the beginning of her mandate, last year, an idea that had put forward the fervent campaign for linguistic inclusion in Spanish life and language . Upon taking possession, Calvo was sworn in as a member of the "Council of Ministers". He then asked the Royal Spanish Language Academy – who is organizing with his American academies the VIIIth Language Congress in Cordoba – to study the Constitution to see how to adapt it to the need, for it imperative, to implement enunciate inclusive language.

The Academy has slowed down. The former director, Darío Villanueva (a prominent linguist), offered him a long and present, Santiago Muñoz Machado, said that there was time. Pedro Álvarez de Miranda, one of the academics with the greatest sense of humor when he spoke about these language issues, came out and then put the vice president to the presidency for He thinks twice. A journalist with long experience and especially the use of the language in Spain and America, Álex Grijelmo, has discovered at least 491 cases in which it would be necessary to touch the Constitution to respond to the desire of Ms. Calvo inclusive. It seems that the university institution has given as much laziness as the vice-president to insist on the subject.

With regard to this vice-presidential initiative, Álvarez de Miranda, author of important treatises and a small book in which his first response to Carmen Calvo appears, told me: "The rhythms of the Academy are slow and very fast political life., they do not fit And although the Academy is now publishing its report, it seems that the petitioner is disinterested. "But in society, the problem has not diminished: some time ago, the Podemos party had approved a proposal concerning Arturo Pérez-Reverte, the most famous Spanish author, who also sits at the Academy, leaves room to occupy it. a woman. "It's a joke," says Alvarez de Miranda. "Academic status is for life, so that no one can give up his pulpit: you are academic until you die."

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– What is at the heart of the problem?

-Feminists and feminists. They seek recourse to continuous development. The Constitution says, for example, that "Spaniards have the right to decent housing". We all understand that it refers to Spanish and Spanish. The Constitution is written in Spanish in 1978, virtually identical to that of 2019. And the same goes for the era of El Mío Cid, where "bourgeois and bourgeois" take place. That is to say that the language is revealed sometimes but not always, when it is interesting to emphasize that they are all absolutely all the inhabitants of Burgos who come forward to dismiss the Cid and adds "they all had a reason" and he already abandons them all because if you continue to reveal to you, the result would be exhausting.

You can not take the case to exhaustion, says the scholar, "not getting more points than what he has and putting the energies of the feminist claim into more important things."

– In Spain, he fell asleep, but in Argentina, the debate around the inclusive language is very alive, I say to Alvarez de Miranda.

-I am not the Argentinian controversy, but I suppose that it has appeared or will occur in all Spanish-speaking countries. The end in "e" is very curious, I think a joke. Absolutely nobody, not even the Academy, can get a new grammatical morpheme. Some call it "neutral". In Spanish, there are no neutrals, in Latin there is none. If we have two kinds of grammar, we can not invent a third, no language has ever done it. "

I went with similar questions to Álex Gijelmo, in his office as director of the School of Journalism of The country. He does not want any more of these diatribes. It joins the feminist struggle. And he is aware that anything that enters the inclusive debate can be interpreted as an attack on what those in this just struggle are thinking.

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-What do you think the solution should be in the question asked by the government at the Academy?

-The solution is that the reality changes, to end the inequality of women. When that happens, grammar will matter to everyone. In The country Last December, when the Constitution was forty years old, I wrote about the consequences of applying inclusive language. With my meager resources, I found that 491 words had to be added, and horrible paragraphs came out. For example, "The members of the Council of the Judiciary will be chosen from judges and judges, magistrates and magistrates, lawyers and lawyers …". It was endless.

"Argentina is the country where the debate on inclusive language is more intense (which Miranda's Alvarez calls" duplicative language ")," said Grijelmo. "It's good, because it indicates a concern for the language and it's fantastic."

Academician Inés Fernández Ordóñez responded to a written questionnaire. As to whether the question had been raised in Spain in the appropriate terms, he said: "No, as much for the fans as for the detractors." As for the first, he explained. because linguistic changes occur only when a new phonic, grammatical or lexical usage is generalized in the majority of speakers: "Changes are not usually the product of an institutional decision, but of Spontaneous and progressive adoption of a concrete use of time The claim of institutionally determining collective use is futile and does not include the evolutionary functioning of languages ​​". Regarding the second, the rejection of the so-called "inclusive language" with arguments that claim to be an alleged incomprehension does not respond to reality, but hides a certain purism and ignores that many of the inclusive language propositions already exist in the structure. grammatical language as discursive options.

-What would be the right approach for these claims?

-The evolution of the language depends on the collective will of the speakers. You can not censor the majority employment of Spanish speakers nor badume that, therefore, these speakers do not believe in the equality of men and women. The only possible approach, if one is in favor, is to practice it and to show the example. Trying to impose it is counterproductive. The history of language teaches us that linguistic solutions that try to impose themselves by certain institutional means are rarely successful.

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Adela Cortina, professor of ethics at the University of Valencia and influential intellectual Spanish, was "very surprised" at the government's intention to actively involve the Academy in the revision of the terms of the Constitution … This was not urgent: "The main concern of the citizens was and remains unemployment, which puts whole families at risk of exclusion, condemns generations of young people not to work and to adults, for whom professional life is cut short ". Always concerned, says Cortina, "the future of pensions, badistance to people with disabilities, territorial organization …" In this context, he said that "the revision of the Constitution seemed a nod to one sector of society.

It seems to him that "a linguistic reform aimed at avoiding discrimination should be a work of art." Language is an instrument of communication, which must try to be precise and beautiful, in addition to to do justice to the social reality, so I think we need to avoid deployment, and because language is not static, if we want to reform it to give more visibility to socially invisible groups, then we need to make true work of goldsmith ". What worries and disturbs her is the discrimination suffered by the weakest people on a daily basis; discrimination that is not resolved by the dictionary reform ".

Academician, novelist and filmmaker Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón, who will certainly participate in the Congress of Cordoba: "Is the debate exaggerated? No it is not. This shows how important language is. The resulting line will be the one that will be used the most, and of course, it will not be a question of separating the bades, apart from the harangue and the political discourse. "As for knowing if it would be possible to circumscribe the feminist demand in a number of cases, she says: "I think feminism's demands should not be reduced to those of an inclusive language or a division of gender.As Marta Sanz says, welcome to the language fight the monsters and the centaurs, I do not give up the tension, it makes me think, it stimulates me. "

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Manuel Vicent, perhaps the creator of the most fertile language of Spanish literature and current journalism, is putting the number on the alert. He says, "Speaking is a way to breathe, inclusive language is a distortion imposed by a laboratory, whether by politics or academia.Language is made everyday in the street and adapts to the Changing reality in an almost physiological way Inclusive language is part of the battle of feminism It will be imposed as the woman equals the man in all the senses But it causes me some discomfort. you're going to screw up, you're feeling guarded. "

It would not be an exaggeration to say that these two expressions of Vicent are present every day in the debate on inclusive language that was very courageous in Spain a little over two years ago. It is not that he sleeps, he has given way to other emergencies that are not just expressed with words.

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