¿Como cambio mi realidad a través del lenguaje? | Abril Torres | TEDxUNAM
[Music] [Music] Living in Bibiana, I spend my time observing what happens with language. When I read or hear something, I wonder why someone used that word and not another, what they meant when they said this, why they used this form. Even when my mom is scolding me, I notice such trivial things as how she pronounced the "r," which only adds to the complexity. But all this questioning about language almost always raises more questions than it answers, both with my mom and in life. In my studies, I encounter many of these linguistic phenomena, but there's one that particularly catches my attention: gendered language. What is gendered language? Well, simply put, it's a communicative strategy to try to include women in discourse. I don't know if we all remember a president who said "little boys and little girls," and from then on, this gendered approach became popular, where for all children, boys and girls, young men and women, citizens and citizens, it seems like a pretty viable proposal. But what happens when all the concordances Adjectives and articles also have to correspond to gender. If we say "boys and girls," we have to say "are pretty" so that no one feels excluded. Perfect. But what happens if our communication isn't based on simple sentences like subject, verb, and predicate, but rather on much more complex constructions? I don't know, it occurs to me: "boys and girls who are pretty whose parents pick them up from school are more likely to be successful in life." Probably at some point I've lost track of myself a little too. But why? Because this gender doubling gets in the way of what's really important: the message in an everyday conversation. Halfway through, you're going to give up on listening to me, and I'm going to give up on accepting agreement. Of course, if we notice that this phenomenon arises a lot in political spheres or in the media, where the message isn't exactly important, or transmitting it in a clear and effective way, then we could think that it's a pretty valid strategy. Now I want you to tell me if any of you can pronounce this. If any of you could, please come to me afterward. From the conversation, because whenever I try, I end up choking on my own tongue. Why does this happen? This is because I hear with the x's. This is because the x corresponds to the sound k, efe, two consonants together, and then we put it in the middle of two other consonants. Obviously, it doesn't correspond to the syllabic paradigm of Spanish, so none of these, none of us could pronounce it in a sentence. Its pronounceability restricts it to these uses, mainly informal written contexts for internet pages, social networks, blogs. But what happens is that we put it daily on our Facebook to be very inclusive, but when talking to our neighbor, we can't show them how inclusive we are because we can't pronounce it more exactly. The same with this; it does n't belong to any alphabet, so it does n't have a corresponding sound. And well, the easiest thing would be for us to opt for this, perfectly pronounceable by all of you: consonant, vowel, consonant, perfect. But we would run the risk of people starting to think we speak in French, like children or something. But why do our strategies arise? Obviously, it responds to a need to include figures in the discourse. that are not so immersed or recognized in it, but we should ask ourselves: are they useful? Are they sufficient? Do they respond to all our needs as individuals and as a society? In linguistics classes, we are taught something basic: that language is like an onion, which, like others, has layers. These layers tend to change more or less depending on how internal or external they are. The internal layers are those rigid ones where it takes a very long time for anything to happen, and it depends on many things for anything to happen in the language. These are morphology and syntax, that is, form and structure. These language phenomena that I have just presented are syntactic and morphological changes. That is why linguists sometimes dare to say that they will not remain in the language because it depends on many things for them to happen. But it is not about a linguist standing in a half-empty auditorium in front of other linguists saying that these forms will not remain in Spanish because probably the other ten linguists will say nothing, whether it is true for x and y ceta, but rather about us seeing why. Why do these changes arise? Let's try to explain them, and most importantly, let's propose something. What is my proposal? I want us to forget for a second about the rigid, almost perfect inner layers and think about the layers of an onion that break, get dirty, and are in contact with the environment. These outer layers of language are where linguistic change can germinate, where there can be an impact on our environment and our context. These layers are semantics and pragmatics, which are meaning and use. But what do I mean by changing our meanings and our uses? I'll give you an example, perhaps a bit crude, but one that might represent what I mean. The other day I was with my friends. One of them cooked for us, and it was delicious. Another friend said, "It was so good, you can get married now!" As a good joke, we laughed; no one seemed offended. And indeed, my friend is getting married soon. But I was left thinking about this phrase: it restricts us as women to a specific role, a specific obligation, and to a certain extent... The point is, it doesn't segregate, perhaps not very obviously, but how many of these stock phrases are in the collective imagination, phrases we say almost automatically to our friends, our mothers, our daughters, our sisters, and we haven't taken the time to dismantle and reconstruct them based on the new meanings that women and other minority groups have in our society? That's where we can make a change. Finally, I want to mention a phrase often used by opponents of gendered language, but which I think hasn't been given enough importance: " Language isn't sexist, speakers are." This is important because gendered language arises from the assumption that by changing language we will change ourselves as human beings and as a society. However, this phrase implies the complete opposite: that when we stop being sexist, homophobic, racist, xenophobic, whatever you want to call it, we will be able to make a change through our discourse. Perhaps in many, many years, many centuries, this will transcend at the level of structure and form—I do n't know—but today we can modify what we are doing for inclusion. That's why I invite you—I include myself—who from All our areas of study in the interdisciplinary field, including linguistics, obviously seek new forms of inclusion and, most importantly, new forms of linguistic subversion. Thanks to...