• Inclusive language Policy, language and privilege
  • December 2018.The report is ready

The members of the Royal Spanish Academy discuss for the first time this afternoon the report requested by the Government of Spain on the advisability of adapting the wording of the Constitution according to inclusive language criteria. The commission, which had been expressed by Vice President Carmen Calvo in the summer of 2018, has returned to the RAE's agenda after months of forgetting.

However, today's plenary session will not result in the approval of any report, since, according to Academy sources, the work is complex and requires several debates among academics before it can be made public.

The name of the academics who organize the ideas on the possible verbal reform of the Constitution is public: linguists Pedro Álvarez de Miranda, Ignacio Bosque, Paz Bataner and Inés Fernández Ordóñez share the task.

Of the four speakers, the figure that has manifested the most in public on the subject has been Álvarez de Miranda, who published the essay Language and gender (Turner editorial) a year ago. In its pages, the academic assumed the somewhat anachronistic asymmetry of the language, but asked prudence to those who request a grammar reform according to the criteria of inclusiveness: "In no language has its structures changed because someone wanted it that way. Languages ​​change very little by little and moved by the group of its speakers . To pretend otherwise is to head against the wall, lose energy for other more useful battles and address frustration, "the academic then told EL MUNDO.

More or less, that has also been the discourse that Santiago Muñoz Machado has assumed since he assumed the direction of the SAR. In January of this year, for example, Muñoz Machado spoke about inclusive language in Salamanca and the option was open to “make movements that visualize more” the feminine sex in the Spanish language, but with prudence: “The Academy is not closed to those openings when they are reasonable , and that we do not have to say many things to say a single concept, to explain a single idea ».

A month earlier, when Darío Villanueva was still running the SAR, Álvarez de Miranda himself explained that the proposed report on the Constitution was written. "It is reasoned and reasonable" and "without much difference" with respect to the text that the institution already prepared in this regard in 2012, said Alvarez de Miranda.

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