Western Morning News (Saturday)
Minding our language is getting tricky
YOU’VE got to have a lot of sympathy for the jolly train manager who got a public ticking off from his employers for greeting his customers by saying: “Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls.”
Time was when the friendliest greeting you could get out of railway staff was “tickets please” or “take your feet off that seat”.
Now it’s more reassuring to hear the regular travel updates, sometimes delivered with an added dose of humour, to lighten what can be a tedious or uncomfortable journey.
So London North Eastern Railway’s response to a complaint that “train managers should not be using language like this” will surprise many people. The company said it would be having words with the employee who forgot to use gender neutral language and upset a nonbinary passenger in the process.
All this was played out on Twitter, ensuring the train manager in question, while not named, was probably left wondering whether his job was delivering the satisfaction promised when he signed up for a demanding and not terribly well-paid role.
Many, however, will be in support of the non-binary complainee who is doing his bit to campaign for gender neutral language, as supported by the Equalities act of 2010.
LGBTQ+ campaigners have fought hard for gender-neutral language, explaining that phrases such as “ladies and gentlemen” exclude people who do not identify as male or female.
Instead of “he” or “she”, non-binary people sometimes prefer to be referred to by gender-neutral pronouns such as “they” or “zie”.
In fact, in terms of gender neutral language, the UK, USA and other English-speaking countries are way ahead of others which are perhaps more embracing of equality in general. That’s probably because unlike many languages, including German, French and Spanish, our nouns are not defined as masculine, feminine or neuter.
Those genders are deeply rooted in the culture and tradition of the nations who formed them, with some rather sexist inferences. In French, le travail (work) is masculine, while most things to do with the home including la cuisine (kitchen) are feminine. For language students trying to remember the correct gender, the easiest thing is to to think of what would traditionally be considered as something male or female orientated.
More amusingly, I loved the advice from a Spanish teacher who told me “los problemas son masculinos, pero las soluciones son femeninas” – problems are masculine, but the solutions are feminine!
But it’s not always that easy. Take the humble motor car for instance, which many might once consider a boy’s toy! In French, it is la voiture. In German, on the other hand, as Volkswagen ads remind us, it’s neuter: das Auto. Meanwhile, in Spanish it’s masculine: el coche, el automóvil, or el carro.
The Germans thought they had come up with a way to solve the noun gender problem by inserting an asterisk into nouns to try to show they were being made neutral.
But the GfdS, Germany’s most prominent state-sponsored language association, isn’t happy. It says the asterisk “does not conform either to German grammar, or to the rules of spelling.” It highlighted that the asterisk does a poor job addressing words in which the spelling changes based on gender. For instance, “doctor” is spelled without an umlaut in its male form (Arzt) and with one in the female form (Ärztin).
Meanwhile in France, some writers have been sneaking an ‘e’ into masculine words, to make them more embracing. Les dirigeants (leaders) have become les dirigeantes and les élus (elected officials) have become les élues.
This has not gone down very well in a country with its ancient Académie Française, in which 40 revered individuals are charged with overseeing any changes to the French language. The Ministry of Education has released official guidance, banning the added “e,” though encouraging some job roles to be presented in both male and female form, such as in a job posting, which might say “le candidat ou la candidate.”
Compared with those difficulties, the English language can easily be adjusted.
The train manager could simply greet “everyone” on board his train without causing any offence. But like we once joked about British Rail, it might take a little while to get there.
Problems are masculine but the solutions are feminine