“When a person talks too much, they learn little” : An Approach to Gender Contrast and Inclusive Language in English and Spanish

Abstract

[Abstract] Grammatical gender is classified as an innate category of language that organises the way human beings communicate. This paper analyses the category of gender in English and Spanish from a contrastive perspective in order to observe differences and similarities. As a result of these contrasts, it has been observed that Spanish favours more gender discrimination due to its linguistic configuration, whilst English fosters a greater inclusivity. Complementary to this aspect, special attention has been devoted to inclusive language, a category within gender that has been of growing interest over the past years. In this way, an in-depth analysis of real language samples from two different fields has been carried out in order to observe the actual application of inclusive language. Thus, documents belonging to Spanish and English universities have been selected together with a series of governmental writings in order to analyse the presence of inclusive language. The aspects observed, far from illustrating the new vision of inclusive language, display a controversial attitude. In this way, documents with a wider scope follow a stronger adherence to inclusive rules; however, documents that are exclusive to a particular group ignore these guidelines. All in all, the present project contributes to illustrate the important role of grammatical gender in language and the importance of the development and implementation of inclusive language. Furthermore, this exposition could undoubtedly stimulate interest in further research on the subject.