Lula’s government embraces neutral language; understand why this is an error

The government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) has already shown signs that neutral language will be part of the new administration. In possession of six ministers, this spelling change, which is not foreseen in the Portuguese language, has already been used. Agência Brasil, the federal government’s official news website, now managed by Lula’s team, also used the dialect in some content. However, specialists in the Portuguese language claim that this change is merely ideological and has no scientific basis.

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Portuguese teacher and specialist in psychopedagogy, Kátia Simone Benedetti, explains that neutral language is an attempt that goes against the nature of the linguistic cognition of speakers of a language in which gender marking is binary. That is, linguistic cognition, formed in the process of language acquisition during childhood, is formed by an “unconscious baggage of abstract knowledge” about the structure of language.

“This knowledge is used naturally and fluently by the brain, without the use of cost-intensive conscious processing systems and/or resources. This spontaneous and unconscious knowledge does not require cognitive costs and that is why we can use language so easily”, says the teacher.

But the use of the neutral gender goes against this naturalness, as it requires that it is necessary to change the structure of sentences and use cognitive resources that are not adequate for the spontaneous processing of language. According to the teacher, the marking of gender is also not something related to human sexuality, but to the structure of the linguistic system that refers to the system of agreement between the terms of sentences.

“It’s a resource our brain uses to correlate words within sentence structure, so that we know ‘who is referring and relating to whom.’ Gender marking may coincide with biological gender in words designating biological beings, but this does not imply that grammatical gender is equivalent to or specifically expresses the concept of biological gender”, he states.

The teacher also points out the wide range of use of this dialect, since it is not just nouns and adjectives that inflect in gender, but also articles and adjective pronouns. She gives the example of using “amigues” or “todos”. “I can even change the phonological form of these words, but changing all the sentence structures to inflect the determiners and make the necessary agreements is a highly costly task, from the cognitive point of view”, she explains. “It’s unnatural and mentally very tiring. For example, when saying ‘my friends’ or ‘my friends’, I automatically already used the binary marking in the pronouns meu and minha”, adds the teacher.

Supporters of neutral language use the justification that language changes over time. However, this statement is wrong, according to Benedetti. This is because the language changes, but naturally, spontaneously, and not in an imposing way, as LGBT militants seek to insert.

“It is a proposal that ignores the very nature of the language-mind relationship, as it assumes that superficial changes in language can change the way our brain semantically describes the world”, comments the researcher of literacy methodologies.

Dialect excludes more than it includes, says expert

In an interview with People’s Gazette, Cíntia Chagas, Portuguese teacher and author of two bestsellers on the Portuguese language, points out that, despite the alleged objective being inclusion, in fact this dialect is exclusive. “It is presented as something to include people, but, in fact, it excludes. It excludes the blind, who read through software, excludes the deaf, who uses labial language, dyslexics and children and adolescents, because it imposes learning difficulties ”, she says.

She also comments that “it is not possible to write a minimally understandable paragraph using this dialect”. For the professor, neutral language is “pure and simple militancy of gender ideology”. Cíntia believes that the main objective is to implement this language in schools so that gender ideology can be discussed for children and adolescents.

“First they change how we speak, then how we think and then how we act”, criticizes Cíntia. According to the teacher, as soon as the language is implemented, “it starts harmlessly” to discuss non-binary gender and then, non-binary bathroom. “The way it is being done is not honest; the implementation is sneaky”, question.

Neutral language can impact the literacy process

Another problem pointed out by Professor Katia is in the process of learning the language, since Brazil already has chronic difficulties in literacy. With the proposal of neutrality in the language, the scenario would be even more complicated, says the specialist. “Mistakenly equating grammatical gender with biological/identity is yet another way of removing students’ focus on the structure of language, which is indeed the essence of language study at school”.

She adds that developing metalinguistic awareness in students is already difficult nowadays. “The imposition of the use of the neutral gender will be more ‘noise’ in the teaching-learning process of reading and writing”, she says.

The researcher explains that it is a mistaken idea to think that changing the language can change prejudiced behaviors and intolerances. For this, other measures are necessary. “I believe that people need to learn to identify what, in fact, constitutes prejudiced, discriminatory, segregating behavior and seek to develop legal instruments to punish and curb them. Imposing artificial changes in the Language is not the way to go, as its use by the people is something that cannot be controlled”, she points out.