[Ads-l] Teen movement for gender neutrality in Argentine Spanish

[Mark Mandel]

Get a load of this! From the *Washington Post*

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2019/12/05/teens-argentina-are-leading-charge-gender-neutral-language/

*A Language for All*

*Un lenguaje para todes**

Teens in Argentina are leading the charge to eliminate gender in language

By Samantha Schmidt
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/samantha-schmidt/>

DECEMBER 5, 2019

*[**Lee este artículo en español*
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2019/12/05/los-jvenes-en-argentina-estn-librando-una-batalla-lingstica-para-eliminar-el-gnero-del-espaol/>
*]*

BUENOS AIRES — As hundreds of teenagers flooded the dimly lit street for
the student government rally, 18-year-old Natalia Mira raised her hand in
the air and led them in a chant.

It was a song often heard among young people at political rallies in Buenos
Aires, an ode to a former Argentine president, the populist Juan Perón, and
his wife, Eva.

“We will fight from sun to sun,” they sang in front of their high school.
“We are the youth, the soldiers of Perón.”

In Spanish, a language in which all nouns are assigned a gender, the word
for soldiers is masculine: “Los soldados de Perón.”

The lyrics Mira sang were different: “Les soldades.”

To most Spanish speakers, the “e” in both words would sound jarring — and
grammatically incorrect.
But here, teenagers are rewriting the rules of the language to eliminate
gender. In classrooms and daily conversations, young people are changing
the way they speak and write — replacing the masculine “o” or the feminine
“a” with the gender-neutral “e” in certain words — in order to change what
they see as a deeply gendered culture.

*[Click link for whole story]*

* How peculiar! I copied and pasted these pieces of text from the webpage,
but this word showed up in the paste as "tod*a*s", the standard feminine
form for 'all'. Is my smartphone auto-miscorrecting?

MAM

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org