Offensive language

English, at least inclusive English, doesn't talk about firemen any more - we say fire fighters. To complain about the driver who has just cut you up the complaint is that "they" don't know how to drive rather than that he or she is an imbecile. I suspect that the word imbecile is also a word to be avoided but that's a whole extra thing. This is going to be a bit tricky to do because my blogs about language are never popular, and because it includes some Spanish words. Not all of what I'm going to write it is absolutely true but it's good enough for a blog of this nature.

I've been told by Spaniards that Spanish grammar can be pretty inflexible when compared to English. In English, for instance, we can turn almost any noun (a noun is the name for a thing), into a verb, (a doing word). Well established examples are to to book with the same meaning as to reserve, or to sky as in to sky a ball. Nowadays we TikTok too. Spanish has just three endings for verbs - ar,er, ir - which, I am told, makes it more difficult to plunder and use words as verbs. The other side of the coin though is that the way that a Spanish verb ends tells you who is doing the the thing. Bailo means I dance and baila means she, he or it dances. So she drives badly is exactly the same as he drives badly. In turn that means you need no strategy whatsoever to avoid sexist overtones in lots of situations.

Unfortunately that's not true for Spanish nouns. Nouns. as I said are things: egg, bottle, cow and so on. Having gender means that somewhere, somehow, somebody decided that each noun is either masculine of feminine. So while in English book, list, and rubbish are neutral in Spanish a book is masculine and a list is feminine. Sometimes this can seem a bit odd. El pene, the penis is, logically enough, masculine but lots of the other words for the same thing, verga and polla for instance are feminine. It's the same with la vagina, feminine, but coño and chocho, with the same meaning, are masculine.

Lots of nouns, these thing words, have a feminine and a masculine form when they are used to describe a person. A very common way to do this is simply to change the article (A/AN and THE are articles) before the name of the thing. So un estudiante is a male student, and una estudiante is a female student. 

Another very common way to differentiate between male and female is to change the letters at the  end of the  word. So, un alumno is a male student, una alumna is a female student. Very often, though far from inevitably, the ending is o for masculine and a for feminine. An example is hermana for sister, and hermano for brother. This is where one of the big problems come in modern usage. I, that's me personally, have one brother and one sister. If someone asks me about my family in English I would say I have a sister and a brother. The traditional Spanish answer to the same question with the same family would be that I have two hermanos. The most direct translation of dos hermanos into English is that I am saying I have two brothers. That's because the Spanish grammar rule is that if you have a mix of male and female words then the male version takes precedence. Grammarians say this has nothing to do with men taking precedence over women - it was just a 50/50 chance decision!!!! Modern Spanish people trying to avoid this would follow the English language style and say that they had one hermana and one hermano to make it clear. Nonetheless, someone trying to give me a bit of a Spanish lesson told me that the poster I'd designed inviting girls and boys to come along to Santa's grotto was poor Spanish - they were adamant that by inviting the boys the girls would have known they were welcome too.  Just like we know that Neil Armstrong meant women too when he took his giant leap for mankind. In writing this can be got around by using the at symbol herman@s. As you may imagine this is not a popular option with lots of people; " For the love of Pete it's a symbol - not a letter!!"

Language can be very emotive. I remember heated debates on British Radio 4 about the use of can as against may or how to pronounce envelope. This male precedence gender rule in Spanish is much deeper. The way round it of inviting male friends and female friends, boys and girls, ladies and gentlemen seems, to the traditionalists only just marginally less stupid than inventing new words. And we won't even touch on how to include non binary people. Doubling up on words makes sentences more cumbersome but more modern thinkers go for the importance of equality and inclusiveness and don't worry too much about having to say more words or the technicalities of the word itself. They presume that context will explain slightly odd words. Although cartero means a postman cartera has, traditionally been the word for a wallet. It hasn't stopped the person ringing the entryphone to deliver the mail describing themselves as a cartera. It's still not an easy struggle. The lower house of parliament is called the Congress of the (male) Deputies. I suspect it will be a while before the name gets changed.

And the traditionalist have an ally in something called the REA, the Real Academia Española, which is the august body which tries to control the Spanish language and publishes the "definitive" Spanish dictionary. It's actually quite a useful body in trying to coordinate the language through all the counties where Spanish is spoken - so that Mexicans can talk to Equatorial Guineans and Nicaraguans but it is also entrenched in the past and thinks that messing around with hermanos/as is tantamount to wordslaughter. You'll no doubt be super surprised to learn that of the 46 people who currently make up the RAE 38 are men. Four of those eight women were elected in the last two or three years. My guess is that the RAE is not a hotbed of progressive thinking.

I know what I think about trying to make language more inclusive but in conversations with Spaniards (when we're not talking about food) I've found very few who agree. 

Staying neutral

Last Friday, November 25, there were demonstrations and events all over Spain for the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. As you enter the majority of Spanish towns and cities you will see a purple sign telling you that this town is against gender violence - that's one of Pinoso's on the left. When women in Spain are murdered by their partners or ex partners the murder is always given prominence in the news. There is a well publicised, 016, national helpline against gender violence. In Pinoso every first Friday of the month at 8pm, there are a few minutes of silence to remember the victims of gender violence. Spain was the fourth country in the world to introduce same sex marriage. The Yes is Yes Law that has just come into force, and which is having a stormy introduction for some dodgy legal drafting, is legislation which makes prosecution of rapists and abusers much less difficult and less traumatic for women. A new bit of legislation came into force today that stops gender stereotyping in the promotion of toys. The Trans Law allows for people to elect which sex, if any, they wish to be with almost no administrative or legal fuss and there are laws in the pipeline in respect of human trafficking and prostitution. There are other procedures, like women getting paid time off work for serious period pain or men getting paternity leave, that have been in place for a while. The point is that Spain is pretty go ahead on gender legislation.

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!

_______________________________________

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.