Adela Cortina said that what goes unnamed does not thereby cease to exist: it exists, it simply is not seen, it is ignored and hidden. The way we use language hides realities so we do not have to see them and therefore acknowledge them. Recognition, says Ana de Miguel in Ética para Celia, should be a human right, expressed through communication, in deeds as well as words. Every person deserves to be spoken, to be recognised. That is precisely one of the aims of inclusive language: to make visible and explicit what is invisible yet real.
To talk about inclusive language - or better, about inclusive communication- we have to tackle several key ideas: thought and language, language itself, and politics.
Language has always been said to be alive, shifting, flexible and broad, something that evolves along with societies through the people who make them up: people. They are the ones who created it and who use it constantly, so why should they not also be the ones to change it so that it reflects what they think? In the end that is what language is: a carrier of human thoughts and feelings.
In Spanish, one of the richest languages, we have what many others have: grammatical gender. Could grammatical gender shape the way we think? It certainly could. Every noun is assigned a gender, masculine or feminine. A simple example: in Spanish the moon is feminine, not only grammatically but in every sense. That feminine article lends the moon attributes we have established as feminine. In children's stories, for instance, the sun (masculine) is often in love with the moon (feminine) and they want to marry. In German it is the other way round: the sun is feminine and the moon masculine. Do their attributes change? Does their meaning?
Lera Boroditsky explains how language shapes, or can shape, the way we think. The question is clear: do we speak the way we think, or think the way we speak? Could we change the way we think as a society by changing the way we communicate? The theory says yes - that language is a route, a use we make of it, directly bound up with the society and the context we live in.
Another important idea is language itself. One of the commonest criticisms of inclusive language is that it transforms and distorts Spanish, a charge made by the more purist among my fellow philologists - and, sadly, among the women philologists too. But following the same thread: is the language itself sexist, or is our use of it? If Spanish already offers us different alternatives without having to invent anything, why not use them instead of constructions we built as a sexist society and which are therefore sexist? If language reflects reality, which reality do we want to reflect, and why does our communication - and the Spanish we use - render so much of it invisible? What I mean by this is that, even without inventing new words or constructions, we have more than enough alternatives for communicating inclusively. Inventing, however, is evolution. Language, as we have seen, is evolution. This is where we should talk about the Royal Spanish Academy, but let us leave that for another article - or you can read María Martín and her Ni por favor ni por favora.
Finally, we cannot forget that we live in a society and that everything is politics, and political. Mercedes Bengoechea argues that if our society is built on structures that rank and discriminate, it is only natural that we communicate in ways that preserve those hierarchies, that our belief system makes unjust things look normal, and that our conceptual frameworks rest on inequality. Teresa Meana holds that the sexism and androcentrism of language can only be resolved for good if the social structures and conceptual frameworks that produce and reinforce its sexist use change. To get there, Meana calls for women to be named in their private and public lives, and for the language to be altered and reworked - since it is alive and evolving - in order to rework the mindset and behaviour of the people who use it. These arguments bear directly on the role models and reference points we communicate, whether only male or only female, and on the consequences that has.
Nor can we deny that all of this is a political question, because language is political, societies are ideological and the use made of communication is deliberately political. Because politics is life in the polis, and it is some centuries now since women won our place in public life. Name it - nothing bad will happen.