How wokism invades language
Our very youngest children are learning that they get to decide what their biological gender is and which pronouns they will employ—even before they know that a “pronoun” is. A college professor lost his job for using the “new proper name” of a student and not employing the designated pronouns. Three middle school boys in Wisconsin were labeled sexual predators for not using the designated pronouns of a classmate even when they did address the person by the new chosen name. Other cases abound. Last September, sources listed 78 pronouns in English.
Two years ago, I engaged in an exchange about the term “Latinx” to reference Spanish-speaking people. (Note: According to Spanish-language academies, “Latino/Latina” refer to peoples in the Americas whose language origin is Latin—Spanish, French, Portuguese. Activists in this country created the gender-neutral term “Latinx” and use it only to refer to Spanish-speaking Americans.) The term was employed in a book I was reviewing as part of a committee. When I challenged the term, I was “told in no uncertain terms” that my linguist input was irrelevant. The chair of the committee referred to her daughter’s school district. I contacted university professors and published linguists in Costa Rica. They found the created term repulsive and not a part of the Spanish language—other than in the PC culture of the USA. Even the Spanish Language Academy (Real Academia Española, Madrid) strongly rejected the petition to accept “Latinx” into the official language. The majority of Spanish-speaking people also precluded its use.
Hit pause…the attempt to rewrite the Spanish language has spread to Spanish-speaking countries and beyond. In Argentina, Buenos Aires’ mayor, Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, announced a ban on woke Spanish. He declared that e, x, and @ are no longer acceptable in the city’s schools. Students must learn the standard language of Cervantes. By contrast, the leftist President greeted his supporters in late May with “amigos, amigas y amigues.” The Argentinian activists, imitating the movement in the USA, have created words (example: todxs or amigues) that do not exist as they try to eliminate gender—biological and grammatical.
In English, the changes basically refer to “woman” and the creation of a flood of pronouns. In Spanish, it means the entire language must change, if the radicals prevail, since every word has grammatical gender which is not the same as biological gender.
French is like Spanish, derived from Latin that also had a grammatical gender assigned to every word. In France, the attempt to include a gender-neutral pronoun-“iel” last year caused din among some politicians, including a member of Parliament and the First Lady who vehemently opposed the efforts. The French Minister of Education declared “Inclusive writing is not the future of the French language.”
The language academy is funded by the French government, and its principal duty is to keep the language devoid of unwelcome influences, especially from English. The term created to describe the gender-neutral debate is “le wokisme,” indicating with this Anglicism that the debate comes from the outside.
German has three genders—masculine, feminine and neuter—for people and things. There appears to be a very divisive debate about inclusive language in German. For example, “citizen” is translated into German as a male citizen—Bürger and a female citizen –Bürgerin. “Citizens” (unknown gender or mixed group) is/was the masculine as the default. Now, the “star” (asterisk) or colon is used to be woke. “Citizens” is now rendered by Bürger*innen, according to the progressives. Verbally, that is pronounced by pausing briefly mid-word with a glottal stop.
Duden, the principal dictionary and grammar reference, has introduced more woke examples into the language, and that has met with very vocal resistance from some German citizens who want to “save the German language from Duden.”
As a point of reference, I checked with Duden for “young girl”—it is still listed as “Mädchen”-neuter. It appears that Duden has not completed its progressive work to change the language.
How does a minority have such far-reaching influence? The influence will grow as the divisive ideologies (CRT, DEI, SEL, etc.) invade education. Vladimir Lenin declared “Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” Marxism and Communism have made deep inroads into our schools.
Now, we face the battle of language, and the war is in our schools and with our children. Another adage warns us and invites us to action. “He who controls the language controls the masses.” That statement from Saul Alinsky in Rules for Radicals should be taken seriously and a call for Patriots to fight back.
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