Language and gender equity: rights, contradictions and pending tasks in Mexico’s promoted inclusive language guides
Abstract
For over a decade, in Mexico inclusive language has been promoted within government institutions and public bodies without any sign of significant progress. This is partly due to the constant opposition to both social and linguistic changes. Additionally, speakers face difficulties stemming from formal contradictions that must be resolved by those who seek to bring equity into language. This work analyzes three fundamental documents on inclusive language: the Manual para el uso no sexista del lenguaje (Manual for the Non-Sexist Use of Language) (Pérez, 2011), the Manual de comunicación no sexista (Manual of Non-Sexist Communication) (Guichard, 2015), and the Informe de la Real Academia Española sobre el lenguaje inclusivo y cuestiones conexas (Report of the Royal Spanish Academy on Inclusive Language and Related Issues) (RAE, 2020), all of which are institutionally endorsed and recommended by public entities under the banner of gender equity. The central hypothesis of this work is that one of the main obstacles to the dissemination and, consequently, the use of inclusive language lies in the formalist contradictions present in the most important manuals. The results highlight the need for formal linguistic work in two of the analyzed documents, as well as the unavoidable necessity for both the Royal Spanish Academy (Real Academia Española) and the Mexican Academy of Language (Academia Mexicana de la Lengua) to propose conciliatory solutions from sociolinguistic paradigms rather than merely formalist ones.
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References
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