Declensions in Decline: Parsing the International Push for Gender Neutral Language
Salient (Harvard Student Publication)
In a biting piece, the authors show how the attempt to colonize foreign language with Western gender ideology is on the march through the pronoun wars (“not even prepositions will feel safe”), starting off in a first lesson in a Harvard Portuguese class dedicated to gender-neutral pronouns in which words new to the language are introduced. “As usual, the English-speaking world doesn’t need to invent something—be it gunpowder, opium, or gender dysphoria—to become its most successful exporter.”
“It’s no mistake that the current iteration of ‘gender ideology’ took off in an English-speaking country, and it’s equally little surprise that speakers of languages with more robust gender systems have proven skeptical,” the author explains.
The author predicts a progressive-led revolution in languages is to come. “All languages with strong gender systems, especially the Romance languages, will—I suspect soon—be asked to undertake radical revisions of their lexicon to adapt themselves to English, genderless practice.”
The exercise goes further, imagining its full impact— “Adjectives especially will need to develop alternate forms to survive in the new political climate. Nouns will not be exempt. Verbs will escape persecution for now, unless—and alas, who could be surprised?—they belong to Semitic languages, which conjugate verbs by gender. Conjunctions will glance fearfully at their correlates. Not even prepositions will feel safe”.
What will Harvard professors do? “A first day review of genderless pronouns may seem like a modest concession to the Zeitgeist. But when the politically motivated demands made of foreign languages and foreign language instruction become more radical, professors will need to decide where they stand.”
The upshot? “Foreign languages don’t need our neopronouns. They don’t need to be fixed. And Harvard shouldn’t try to fix them.”