2025/11/03 by Carla Míguez Bóveda, Isabel Cáceres Sánchez · 1 voice
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Gender Studies in Language #Galician and Iberian cultural studies #Spanish Linguistics and Language Studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.12797/si.25.2025.25.03
openalex publication_date 2025/11/03 · openalex created_date 2025/11/03 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/19
NON-BINARY LANGUAGE AND MINORITIZED LANGUAGES IN THE SPANISH STATE: CATALAN AND GALICIAN PERSPECTIVES Non-binary language (NBL) is a burning issue, especially in hegemonic languages. In the context off the Spanish State, languages like Catalan and Galician have been historically marginalized by the dominance of Spanish. Thus, this article explores how this minority condition affects the development of NBL proposals in both these co-official languages. We carried a bibliographic examination of the NBL grammatical proposals in the selected languages, which were analysed to find similarities and divergences.Catalan and Galician are typologically equal in how they mark gender: they are languages in which gender is a manifested category with a formal mark (morpheme) that specifies gender (cf. Whorf 1937). Furthermore, they have a wide diversity of dialects and even grammar, which complicates the achievement of a NBL standard. On this matter, internal variation of the languages plays a key role on the acceptance or rejection of new proposals, as their recent and changing nature does not go unnoticed for the academies. The Catalan and Galician academies have mostly remained on the sidelines of this grammatical change. However, the debate around the normativization of the proposals has recently begun: voices of the Real Academia Galega shown to be open to this change and the necessity to describe it; whereas the Institut d’Estudis Catalans branded gender neomorphemes as contradictory to the linguistic system. Even with the institutional reluctance, NBL keeps on expanding, reflecting a social and linguistic necessity that academies can’t ignore indefinitely. With the description and comparison of the proposals we hope to fuel this discussion in favour of the inclusion of everyone in the minoritized co-oficial languages of the Spanish State.