Not a man’s world

Language is a great tool to bring about change, but can it be altered to bring about gender equality We debate modifying terminologies and gender binaries

Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is — goes a well-known line from a celebrated French writer, Albert Camus. But in today’s world, this line could be considered politically incorrect for its gender binary. Recently, the HR department at Princeton University released a four-page guideline to sensitise the practice of gender inclusive language, where words like ‘humankind’ and ‘fireperson’ would give way to ‘mankind’ and ‘fireman’, respectively. In such a world, which does not conform to gender binaries, not only the champion of the absurd, but a host of other writers, would have to rephrase their aphorisms to begin with. But perhaps it’s the translator who couldn’t do justice to the original French, which is technically a more inclusive language.

Closer home, with 10 per cent of the population speaking in the language, India claims to have the second largest English speaking population, with nearly 2 billion people using it. In a country that’s still having debates over gender equality, will the language be able to drill through the collective consciousness

“These changes are more pertinent today than ever,” says stand up comic and writer Anuvab Pal. “Today men and women are in almost all professions and introducing such changes would be a good start. People who think this is stretching political correctness a bit too far, I think their argument is ridiculous — it will be so nice to make snow persons,” he adds. However, there are words that he finds more problematic. “There’s always a gender association with words like ‘hero’ and ‘wrestler’. Hence you need to use words like ‘female wrestler’. I think the bigger problem is with the English language — which doesn’t have masculine and feminine like French, German or Hindi.” But in the grand scheme of things, the comic feels that “it would be interesting to live in a world with ‘superperson’ and ‘spiderperson’”.

Giving a thumbs up to the effort, Paromita Vohra, filmmaker and writer, says, “There needs to be a shift in language so that gender-neutral terms become commonplace, especially since now we are looking at so much more than just binaries. For instance, the prefix Miss or Mrs has been replaced by Ms. It is now thought of as commonplace, but it took concerted thought and effort to get there.”

However according to her, it is not enough to simply change the terminology. “Many things need to change in tandem for the world to be a more inclusive place, and the change in language is one of them,” she adds.

In the US, Princeton is not the only university to come up with such a rulebook. Earlier, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Writing Centre advised students against using compound words, which include 'man'. Last month, the US Marine Corps decided to remove ‘man’ from 19 job titles.

“Changing terminology is not a new phenomena; educated circles in the US have already begun replacing ‘he’ with ‘she’ and ‘they’,” says Indranil Dutta, a professor at the School of Language Sciences at Eflu, Hyderabad. Explaining further, he adds, “It is definitely easier to make these changes in the English language, where you only have to make changes in the lexicon, as opposed to gendered languages like French, German or Hindi, where the entire grammatical structure would have to change if you try to make it gender neutral. Besides, gendered languages have quite a few idiosyncratic features. For instance, in German, girls from the age of 13 to around 16 are referred to in the neutral gender and in Hindi, you refer to the police force in the feminine gender (police aa rahi hai). I do not know if a change in lexicon will bring about a societal change, as I cannot recall such a situation having come to pass before. The change begins with one’s upbringing, so while Princeton changing the lexicon can help sensitise people, I am not sure that it will bring about any social change,” he says.

Professor Franson Davis Manjali from Centre of Linguistics and English, JNU, Delhi, points at the much bigger problem, “Much of language(s) is/are politically (ideologically) constituted. Therefore they need to be changed or corrected. Not only language as such, but whatever is spoken or written in language. For example, words like America (named after an Italian of the 15th century), ‘Indian’ based on a gigantic mistake, all these will need to be corrected.”

But such changes don’t impress columnist and socialite, Suhel Seth, much. Instead, he finds the lack is in American English. “This is nothing new, it’s has been there in Wren and Martin since 1978. So what Princeton is thinking today, UK had already thought yesterday. And that’s why rich industrialists are sending their kids to US on sponsorship money.”