What the Debate about Spanish Gender-Inclusive Forms Reveals Regarding Ideological Beliefs about Language and Authority
The “masculine generic” is a feature of Spanish that dictates that the masculine ending, (-o), is generally used as the default when referring to a mixed-sex group or when the sex of a person or group is unknown. Critics have claimed that this linguistic feature is sexist and contributes to the invisibility of women and gender-nonconforming people within the language (Eisenberg, 1985). In order to combat these issues, critics have campaigned for the revision of Spanish to include gender-inclusive language, which has continued to be a source of debate, both from the bottom-up and from institutions such as the Real Academia Española, or the RAE, the official language academy of Spain. This study investigates Spanish speakers' ideologies toward inclusive language and the RAE's role as a linguistic authority through a discourse analysis of reactions to the RAE’s acknowledgement of one of these linguistic forms, the gender-neutral pronoun elle. I examined this particular debate as it occurred on social media, where I collected 100 tweets from Twitter, along with 300 replies to 3 posts on Facebook, all of which were created in reaction to or discussing this particular event. I conducted a critical discourse analysis on this data (Wodak and Meyer, 2016; van Dijk, 2015), through a framework connecting the notions of language attitudes and language ideologies (Irvine & Gal, 2000; Garley, 2019; Paffey, 2007). To identify the ideologies, I utilized a bottom-up approach and allowed them to emerge from the data rather than applying preconceived categories, which resulted in the identification of 32 ideological strains. The results of the analysis revealed that the RAE is not perceived to hold absolute power in how the Spanish language is spoken, and there were conflicting opinions as to where this power lies and to whom this power should be attributed. The majority of the reactions to elle and inclusive language adhered to a prescriptivist view of language, while also reflecting beliefs speakers hold towards gender minorities and revealing the ways in which language and discourse are used as means of both asserting and denying political and social power.
Anthropological Linguistics and Sociolinguistics, Prescriptivism, Linguistic sexism, Gender-inclusive language, Masculine generic, Language regulator, Computer-mediated communication
City University of New York - Graduate Center
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The Graduate School and University Center of The City University of New York