The Movement to Make the Spanish and Portuguese Languages More Inclusive

As someone who was born in Brazil and has lived in Uruguay for a long time, I speak both Spanish and Portuguese. Over the last few years, I’ve followed how the feminist and the LGTBQIA+ movements in Latin America have started to criticize how these languages express so much systemic prejudice and misogyny and are proposing changes to make them more inclusive.

While English is a gender-neutral language, Portuguese and Spanish are both grammatical gender languages, which means that almost all of their nouns change according to gender — and therefore, the adjectives, articles, and pronouns that agree with these nouns also adjust to comply with gender. So while saying “they” in English could refer to a group of men, women, both, or even a single nonbinary person, in Spanish, you must clarify the genders of everyone included in that group; you say “ellas” if they are all female or “ellos” if they are all male or if there’s a mix of genders (that’s right, the masculine word is also used for the plural form or any kind of generalization).

While there have been debates around sexism in languages since the 1970s, high school and young university students in Latin America are leading newly invigorated conversations about inclusive language. Their main argument is that the way we use our language is a heteronormative force, forcing us to fit into a binary definition and excluding those who decide to go against it. Using masculine words to represent diverse groups perpetuates male supremacy and doesn’t represent women, nonbinary folks, and others who identify their gender differently. Of course, research shows people who identify with genders apart from the man/woman binary have always existed.

In Spanish and Portuguese, feminists and activists from the LGBTQIA+ movements suggest turning them into inclusive languages by replacing the use of the suffixes “-o” for masculine and “-a” for feminine with other letters or symbols, as you can read in articles from newspapers in Brazil and Argentina. Following their recommendation, words like “meninos,” which is Portuguese for boys, is now exchanged with “meninxs,” “menin@s” or “menines” by some. “Menines” is one of the most predominant adaptations because using “-e” instead of “-o” is both inclusive and easier to speak than “x” or “@.”

Unfortunately, organizations such as the Real Academia Española, which dictates the way Spanish should be spoken, have pronounced themselves against the incorporation of “x”, “@,” or, “-e” to the legitimate rules. However, languages are ever-evolving. They are affected by the way people use them and, as a consequence, change.

Take, for example, how, in 2015, the Swedish Academy decided to incorporate the gender-neutral pronoun “hen” into their dictionaries. When they announced the incorporation of the word into the dictionary, their justification was that the use of the word and its evolution in society for many years demonstrated that it fulfills a function and should therefore be added to the language norm. In English, it has become so common to use the pronoun “they” to refer to nonbinary people that, in 2019, the Merriam-Webster dictionary added this definition to their materials.

Of course, there are people who claim changing a language to be more inclusive is confusing, too difficult to incorporate into an established vocabulary, or just plain wrong since it goes against the norm. The president of Argentina’s Academia, Alicia Zorrilla, defended this point of view in an article, stating, “the inclusive language is not a language, it’s the mirror of a socio-political position. It lacks linguistic foundation, and it’s outside the grammatical system.”

Others argue that it’s possible to use language more inclusively without fundamentally changing it by adding words to phrases to make them more representative or reflective of the collective instead of the individual. Take, for example, the phrase “good night to you all.” Instead of saying “buenas noches a todos,” which is gendered, one could say “buenas noches a todos y todas,” which includes both men and women.

The conversation about altering languages to be more inclusive is an important one and should also extend beyond gender. There are many racist, prejudiced, and stereotyped words and expressions in Spanish and Portuguese that exclude and/or judge people of color, disabled people, and other marginalized groups. The important thing is that more and more people seem to be joining this conversation, which is the best way to move forward and develop a language that represents us all.