Well, since I'm the one quoted....
linguoboy wrote:There have been some recent attempts to do something about the situation in Spanish. I'd recently heard about the
-e termination, but not about some of these other proposals:
https://nonbinary.wiki/wiki/Gender_neutral_language_in_Spanish. I find them fascinating because they represent a much more thoroughgoing attempt to shift grammatical norms than just creating a set of gender-neutral pronouns. I haven't heard of any other Romance languages attempting anything as radical.
Yes, but the problem with many of them, like
amig@,
amig*,
amigⒶ,
amigx, etc., is that they work fine in writing but don't have an agreed-upon pronunciation. When reading them aloud, you send up saying "
amigo/amiga", and if you're going to say it that way, you might as well be writing it that way too (which has already been a norm for a long time, usually written as
amigo/a). RAE's position is: "El uso de la arroba como marca de género no es ni necesario ni aceptable desde el punto de vista de la morfología del español. Si desea dirigirse explícitamente a personas de uno y otro sexo, puede usar la barra separando las terminaciones, en el orden que desee."
► Show Spoiler
Translation: The use of the @ as a gender mark is not necessary nor acceptable from morphological point of view. If one wishes to explicitly refer to people of one sex and the other, one can use the slash to separate the endings, in the order one wishes."
With the vowels, there are several issues. Using "e" creates some homonyms ("los/las" become "les", but that already has a different use, for example), and for many words the -e ending is a masculine form already in the plural (españoles, doctores, profesores, etc.) so it's harder to view it as inclusive.
Using "u" (
amigu) (and in some cases "i") is perceived as imitating/mocking an indigenous (and unfortunately, by stereotypical association, uneducated) accent in some regions - try to adapt to the needs of one group and alienate another! - although if the use of "u" for gender-neutral language became better-known the association with indigenous and/or uneducated accents would hopefully die away.
For now, though, it's all really quite complicated.
For example, here's what RAE has stated: "La morfología del género en los sustantivos que designan seres animados se basa en un esquema binario, basado en las categorías biológicas de sexo masculino/femenino, de manera que el sistema lingüístico no dispone de un recurso específico para esa eventualidad." and "El uso de la @ o de las letras «e» y «x» como supuestas marcas de género inclusivo es ajeno a la morfología del español, además de innecesario, pues el masculino gramatical ya cumple esa función como término no marcado de la oposición de género."
► Show Spoiler
Translation: The morphology of gender in nouns that designate living things is based on a binary framework, based in biological categories of masculine/feminine sex, so the linguistic system doesn't offer a specific resource for this eventuality." and "The use of the @ sign or of the letters "e" and "x" as supposedly inclusive gender markers is foreign to Spanish morphology, and is unnecessary, since the grammatical masculine form already fulfills this function as a term unmarked for gender."
They also recommend simply avoiding gendered words, such as saying things like "cada quien" in place of "cada uno". Trying to
entirely avoid gendered words in Spanish in spoken language is impossible though, at least the way it is now.
Google Translate made a big deal of adding gender-specific translations a year or two ago, hyped as "eliminating gender bias" (which is a valid point, as previously it used mainly masculine forms). But it also created the awkward situation that if you type "non binary" into Google Translate, you get a little note right above the translation that says "Translations are gender-specific" and proceeds to offer you two translations: "No binaria(feminine)" or "No binario(masculine)". This was unfortunately turned into a meme supposedly claiming that Google Translate was taking a stand against gender-neutral terms. But actually this is not the case as GT also gives a definition of "non binary" which is the following: "not relating to, composed of, or involving just two things.
Aristotelian ontology is nonbinary on the second level in that it allows for degrees of being 2 relating to, using, or denoting a system of numerical notation that does not have 2 as a base.
The enumeration data is stored in a nonbinary format." So it is not talking about the human gender-related meaning of "non binary", at least not primarily. Anyway, they have
somewhat fixed it; you still get what I've described above if you type in "non binary" as two words or joined by a hyphen, but if you write it as "nonbinary" (as one word), it gives you only one choice, "no binario" (and the masculine form is correct for the gender category, because it refers to
género no binario, and
género is masculine regardless of the gender of the person in question.
Another gender issue is the use of the masculine form whenever there is any man in a group, regardless of the presence of women. I once had a guy ask me why he should learn the use of the word
nosotras if there is no conceivable situation in which he would ever say it, and to a certain extent he does have a point there (although he should learn it in order to understand people say it when they are referring to groups he isn't part of, for example).
But there is also a trend to go by "majority rules" rather than "male-dominated" language, by which I mean that traditionally in a group of 30, if there are 29 women and one man, everyone in the group should use the word
nosotros ("we") because of that one man, but by "majority rules" then everyone in the group should use the word
nosotras (even the man should use it when he wants to say "we") because there are more women than men.
It makes some sense. I've seen that logic being used in conversation but I've yet to encounter a situation in which the men say
nosotros while the women in the same group say
nosotras, although, to be honest, that would seem to me to be a fairly logical solution as well.
I think the issue with that scenario might be that by using
nosotros in that situation it might sound as though the men were objecting to the women's use of
nosotras for the group ("correcting" the women by using the "right" pronoun), rather than simply referring to their
own gender.
This is a long (156p) but interesting read:
Informe de la Real Academia Española sobre el lenguaje inclusivo y cuestiones conexas