Abstract:

Inclusive language must take into account speakers of any origin, nationality, sexual orientation, gender identity, race or religion. This is especially relevant in plural contexts –multilingual, multiethnic, multicultural, multigender–, such as those found in Higher Education institutions. In this context, initiatives that have given rise to guides for the use of inclusive and non-sexist language are noteworthy, such as those proposed by the European Parliament (2009), translated to 22 languages, the Spanish General Council of the Judiciary (Consejo General del Poder Judicial. Comisión de Igualdad, 2009), Madrid City Hall (Ayuntamiento de Madrid, 2017) or some public Spanish universities.

Given the significant place of inclusive language in Higher Education, there is a need to delve deeper into the keys to inclusive language. Therefore, the main objective of this work is to develop an evaluation tool to analyse and describe (gender-)inclusive language, from an institutional language perspective, more specifically, from the perspective of Spanish public universities.

For such a purpose, the employed methodology consisted of the following phases. First, a bibliographical revision of all the guides for inclusive language published by Spanish universities was carried out. Second, those guides and their common key points were synthesized. Finally, these commonalities were established as a set of inclusive language assessment indicators.

As a result of this analysis, an evaluation framework was developed to assess the presence of inclusive language in different types of texts, including linguistic elements, as well as non-linguistic elements (images, videos, design, etc.).

This tool has opened future lines of research, such as, analysing inclusive language in texts of different genres, produced in different fields and covering different topics. Moreover, this tool helps to offer a description of the characteristics of institutional inclusive language in Higher Education in Spain.

References:
[1]Ayuntamiento de Madrid. (2017). Guía para el uso inclusivo del lenguaje en el Ayuntamiento de Madrid y sus organismos autónomos. https://www.madrid.es/UnidadesDescentralizadas/IgualdadDeOportunidades/Publicaciones/GuíalenguajeinclusivoNosexista.pdf
[2] Consejo General del Poder Judicial. Comisión de Igualdad. (2009). Normas mínimas para evitar la discriminación de la mujer en el lenguaje administrativo del CGPJ. https://www.poderjudicial.es/cgpj/es/Temas/Igualdad-de-Genero/Normas-minimas-lenguaje-inclusivo
[3] European Parliament. (2009). Gender-neutral language in the European Parliament. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/publications/2009/0001/P6_PUB(2009)0001_EN.pdf

Keywords:

Higher Education, inclusive language, gender-inclusive language, Spanish universities, linguistic analysis.