Now if you're old and British, like me, you may remember a time when there was a lot of guff in the UK about things like saying milkman, chairman of the board, housewife. Was it ladies or women? Were women strong enough to drive buses? I worked for a charity at the time and we spent ages arguing about whether I could use Chair in the minutes instead of chairwoman or chairman for the person who chaired a meeting. How many times did someone painstakingly explain to me that a chair was a piece of furniture not a person? Language is a powerful tool on the road to equality and, so far as I know, that's a battle that has long been won in the UK. Firefighters, police officers, cabin crew, actor, headteacher and scores of similar words just get used naturally, without a second thought. Even the most reactionary manages policewoman and the like.
Spanish, like lots of other languages, has gender for words. Some words are masculine and some words are feminine. The word for a woman, la mujer, is feminine. The word for a man, el hombre, is masculine. The, the word the, is a marker for the gender of the word - la or el. All words have gender even when it isn't obvious. La silla, the chair, is feminine but el sofá, the sofa, is masculine. Sometimes the choice of gender for the word seems a bit perverse - a couple of slang words for a penis are polla and verga and both are feminine whilst one of the slangy words for a vagina, coño, is masculine.
People tend to adaptability. Take councillor; the Spanish is concejal or maybe concejala. It was something on Facebook from a local councillor that was the spark for this post. The official dictionary says that it's the same word, concejal, for a man or a woman - just change the article - articles are a/an and the in English. So, for a woman you'd say la concejal and for a man you'd say el concejal. But nowadays lots of people want to stress that women have status within local councils. So, the activist line is to use la concejala for a woman and el concejal for a man. Personally I'm all for this. Sometimes the feminised word already has a different meaning but when the woman postie buzzes on the door phone and says cartera I don't wonder why a wallet or a portfolio is talking to me on the intercom. I can work out that cartera might have two distinct meanings and I know it's the postwoman/postal operative/mail carrier, at the door. Lots of Spaniards apparently don't. The line they take is that the official dictionary says such and such and that's good enough for them.
The official dictionary in Spanish is an odd fish. It's like most dictionaries in that it usually describes a word and maybe gives an example of its use. Another of its purposes is to maintain the language spoken in over 20 different countries unified. For that reason the dictionary is sometimes more like a long vocabulary list. Not that it does, but it might, say that to shampoo is the action of applying shampoo. If you don't know what shampoo is then you have to look up a second word. The official dictionary is slow to include new words, it often takes years and years. The people behind the dictionary don't care for anglicisms. People in the street might say cyberattack (ciberataque) or hashtag (hashtag) but you won't find them in the dictionary. I've had discussions, verging on arguments, with Spaniards about the dictionary being controlled by old white men in grey suits but let's just say the dictionary tends to the conservative.
The biggest problem though comes with plurals. Generally, in Spanish grammar masculine gender takes precedence over feminine gender. Instead of saying brothers and sisters you "should" use the equivalent of brothers in Spanish to describe, well, brothers and sisters. One way around this is to mention both genders - hermanas (sisters, feminine) and hermanos (brothers, masculine) which can get unwieldy. Sometimes there is no dictionary accepted masculine or feminine form. That's when the politically progressive invent a word and when the traditionalists scurry for their official grammar and dictionary. They have a point to prove.
It's become even more dodgy recently now that there are people who define themselves as either male or female. There are occasional examples of people in the news trying to include a third, gender neutral, word. For instance to say "Hello everyone," the traditional Spanish phrase is "Hola a todos" but that's masculine. So to be inclusive it became "Hola a todos and todas," (masculine and feminine). Include the gender neutral form and you get "Hola a todos, todas and todes." In the written form the @ symbol (an o and an a combined) is still common but sometimes you'll see an x instead - todxs.
It often surprises me how reactionary lots of Spaniards are about this. I'd still be arguing about furniture if I worked here!
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That official dictionary is El Diccionario de la lengua española, the Dictionary of the Spanish Language produced by La Real Academia Española, The Spanish Royal Academy.
