Subtle gender discrimination in Romance languages

by David

Spanish is sexist!

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but if you are talking about 10 women, you use ellas, the feminine pronoun, but if you’re talking about 9 women and one man, you’d use the masculine pronoun ellos. I think this is best illustrated. OK, I’m back 20 minutes later with my work of art.


Gender discrimination

I don’t know all of the history of this phenomenon, but it obviously must derive from Latin. It’s also a hard call to say that the use of ellos is really gender discrimination against women, or if “ellos” is actually a gender-neutral pronoun applicable to mixed groups, and there is no “masculine only” pronoun. If this is the case, then it might be discrimination against men. Women have their own pronoun, but men don’t. :(

2 Comments  leave one »


14.Mar.2007 - 3:33 am

When i saw this rule while studying plural forms, i was very surprised and affected! That is awesome part of learning a language. Very interesting specialty. We were discussing this in the classroom, i gave this example since i was the only one to study Spanish in my class, they were all shocked :D lol

Loving Spanish!

 
#1
15.Mar.2007 - 12:59 pm

Yes, I’ve noticed this peculiarity in the Romance languages (at least French and Spanish- I’m not 100% certain on the others). I haven’t seen it in any other languages though. For example German has only one third person plural subject pronoun “Sie”, which is used indiscriminately for women, men or mixed groups. It would be interesting to see if other languages have a similar feature, or if it’s only something from Latin.

 
#2

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