Gender neutral language in Spanish: Difference between revisions

Spanish has two grammatical genders, masculine and feminine. Like other Romance languages, it's very difficult to talk about a person in a gender-neutral way. This is because every adjective, noun, and article are all either masculine or feminine. It's difficult or even impossible to be completely gender-neutral in standard Spanish. However, feminists, LGBT people, and other activists today have made ideas for how to speak Spanish in a gender-neutral way when necessary. For example, it's now common for people to write "Latinx" or "Latin@" as a gender-inclusive version of "Latino" and "Latina". For more information, see [[Wikipedia:Gender neutrality in Spanish and Portuguese|Wikipedia's article: Gender neutrality in Spanish and Portuguese]].

In Spanish, many nouns and adjectives end in either a masculine -o or a feminine -a. These same letters are also used in the grammatical gender of the definite articles. For example, niño bueno ("good boy") and niña buena ("good girl"); los amigos ("the friends," if the group has at least one man, or isn't known to be all women, although this can be used in a gender-neutral sense) and las amigas ("the friends," but only if the group is all women). Many people who want gender-neutral options for Spanish have had ideas for substituting these letters with something else that would make a word gender-neutral. These non-standard proposed alternatives are:

[[File:Ejemplo de lenguaje inclusivo.jpg|thumb|200px|Spanish-language in Uruguay using neutral articles, referring to martyred students as "les estudiantes."]]

Standard Spanish articles have binary gender as well as number. The indefinite articles are ''un, unos, una, unas''. The definite articles are ''el, los, la, las''. People have come up with some gender-neutral alternatives to these.

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In Spanish, every noun is either female or male. None have a truly "neuter" grammatical gender. There are some kinds of nouns that come close to being gender-neutral in some ways: epicene nouns, common gender nouns, ambiguous gender nouns, and newly-made neutral or genderqueer nouns.

Some words, regardless of their own grammatical gender, are used for men and women alike, without changing the word's ending. Its article stays the same, too. (However, when these nouns are used for women, it's now acceptable in standard Spanish to optionally change to the feminine article.) These words are epicene (epiceno). This is the closest that standard Spanish gets to gender neutral language.

A list of some epicene nouns in conventional Spanish:

* ''ciclista'' = cyclist

* ''la víctima'' = victim.

There are also words with a "common gender" (''común''), meaning that the word itself stays the same whether it's applied to a man or woman, but its article changes gender to match the binary gender of the person to whom it is applied.

* ''el/la violinista'' = violinist

Some words in Spanish aren't consistent in what grammatical gender they have. They've been used as feminine or masculine words depending on the place and time period. They may have one conventional version, plus an alternative gender that is used poetically or in archaic language. These words are rare. There are only about a hundred of them. They still mean the same thing even when their gender changes. (Unlike, say, ''la cometa'' "kite" and ''el cometa'' "comet.") They're called ambiguous nouns (''nombres ambíguos en cuanto al género'').

People have created new, non-standard nouns. Some are gender-inclusive (can be used for men, women, and nonbinary people). Some are only for people who identify as nonbinary or genderqueer.