S&P Lecture Series: “How to Make a Gendered Language Inclusive”

We are glad to invite you to the last presentation in the Spring 2021 S&P Lecture Series on April 23rd (this Friday).

In this talk, I present the results of my first qualifying paper. Not only is gender-inclusivity harder to achieve in masculine-feminine gender languages like Spanish, but it is condemned by institutions like the Real Academia Española who claim that gender-inclusive Spanish is unnecessary and corrosive to the purity of the language. Ironically, most current definitions of linguistic gender lend credence to their claims. I will discuss the linguistics of gender-inclusive language, including the challenges I face in arguing the validity of gender-inclusive language in my field, and I’ll describe the results of a paragraph task I conducted this past winter with twenty Spanish speakers who helped me demonstrate the capacity of a (highly!) gendered language to become inclusive.