The Spanish language and its sexist words

There have been a lot of debate among female groups, especially feminists about the Spanish language and its sexist words. Truth is, they have to do a lot of adjustments to the language to remove sexist words from it.

Is Spanish language sexist?

Some of the proposals are discussed below:

• Splitting of more words (for example alumnos y alumnasor niños y niñas). A lot of words are added to the sentence, leading to redundancy and some humor.
• Adding options with bar like in el afiliado/a. Even though the structure is applied, mostly in documentass that are legal, informal texts and narrative prose also incorporate it. Furthermore, the parenthesis or bars also leads to some unnecessary break in text flow.
• Construction replacement such as using la persona afectada to replace elafectado. For instance, if there is any Spanish character, it uses a huge word quantity. There are instances where periphrasis is also used. It will require more extensive text rules.
• Collective nouns usage. The use of professional words could be avoided. It implies that profesorado should be used where profesoras is included to profesores. The word is not only impractical and heavy, but is also inconveniently masculine.
• Using x to replace ‘o’ or ‘a’ to indicate gender change or the symbol ‘@’. In environments such as the social media, major problems could be avoided by its potentially bothersome use. However, can the innovations be used for book publishing? Can translators give a document with this type of revolutionary spellings to their customers? An alternative is to apply the letter e to change every word that depicts a gender to neutral.

Does the Spanish language pass for a sexist language? Does every language has different terms for different genders that discriminate against women, including those from Latin? Are these a cause for concern? If there is the need for implementation of radical changes, it is better for an artificial language to be invented. If every word in the Spanish language structure is deeply analyzed, there are several words we will find to be barbaric. Due to the evolution of society, languages have also evolved, even if not for their form, at least for their representation. General ideas are sometimes represented in a male gender. A natural change is however required as opposed to using an imposition.

Even though aspects of sex-discrimination have being traditionally discussed by some authors, only semantic gender topics are the major part that was considered. It is only in recent times, the relationship between gender and sex is being analyzed subjectively in the Spanish language along with the various human naming methods and the different specific ways sex examination is carried out. That a language contains sex specification does not mean that occupational titles that are appropriate development should be obstructed to avoid societal mechanisms. Comparisons are made with other languages while the Spanish mechanism is thoroughly studied. Different strategies to remove sexist words from the Spanish language are discussed. And it is becoming evident that there aren’t many choices as a lot does not depend on linguistics but on factors that are subjective and closely related to social status of the individuals being involved.

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