What I learned from a 7-year-old about inclusive language.
A lot has been said and written about inclusive language, particularly in heavily gendered languages like Spanish. Some people try to use…
A lot has been said and written about inclusive language, particularly in heavily gendered languages like Spanish. Some people try to use it, some overuse it, some people complain about this going against the rules of how to correctly use the language, and some people are completely clueless about how and when to use it.
My background in Advertising and my interest in Semiotics led me earlier on to an intuition about its true purpose, and how it transcends the existing rules. I was happy to later see that intuition validated by the opinions of people who are much smarter than me, like Dario Sztajnszrajber (here’s an interview with him on the topic, in Spanish, but you can use the auto-translate feature of YouTube on the Closed Captioning) and some echoes also on the work of Simon Fanshawe when he talks about the dangers of the prescriptive use of pronouns and labels as enablers of difference, not “prisons of sameness”.
This is not about changing the language, it’s not even about language, it’s about intention and meaning. Inclusive language is not meant to be normative, because when it does it loses its potential of generating change, of sounding the alarm about the potential for exclusion.
Inclusive language is meant to be an alert, to others and to ourselves, that puts the focus on the status quo and deconstructs it by showing that things that “simply are”, are in fact also constructions. It makes the existing invisible norms visible and opens the consideration of whether those existing norms are fair and inclusive.
The best analogy I was able to come up with, is inclusive language as the turn signal in your car: if you use it judiciously, is a very valuable indicator of your intention in a particular situation. But if it’s always on, it’s useless and even confusing, the drivers around you don’t know when and if you intend to turn. That’s why the turn signal is meant to be off most of the time.
And this brings me to what I learned about it from my7-year-old son.
As a bit of background, my son was born in the US, came to us as through the foster system, and we were able to adopt him quite recently, after more than 4 years in our care. Although my wife and I speak mostly Spanish at home (we’re both originally from Argentina), we took the habit of speaking to him in English, so that his transition was easier in the beginning, and so we could feel closer to him. Of course, we have been teaching him some Spanish because we see huge advantages to him growing bilingual.
But while my son calls me Dad most of the time, sometimes he calls me “Papá”, and wants me to call him “Hijo”. To me, that’s inclusive language in action, he is sending me a signal through which he appeals to my identity as a Spanish-speaking person, and wants to feel closer to me. So when he calls me “Papá” he is signaling something different from when he calls me “Dad”.
From my perspective, that is the true power of inclusive language: specific signals about specific situations, to subvert the status quo. Otherwise, the signal just becomes noise.