TENDENCIAS ACTUALES EN EL DISCURSO: EL FEMENINO DE LAS PROFESIONES EN ESPAÑOL
CURRENT TRENDS IN THE SPEECH: THE FEMININE OF PROFESSIONS IN SPANISH

Summary/Abstract: In the current context of social changes caused by the continuous creation of new jobs and professions, a very strong tendency can be noted towards the integration of women in technical, intellectual and highly specialized professional fields. The past few decades have shown a constant increase in womens’ interest towards jobs that, until recently, had only been occupied by men. The need that native speakers began to notice in order for them to be able to reflect this social change in discourse and speech has led to grammatical gender alternations in nouns that designate jobs titles and professions. Consequently, investigating the effects of the use of grammatical gender in such nouns on current language and discourse has become a highly important task. The main purpose of this article is to analyze the way in which several native Spanish speakers interviewed in Spain viewed the implications of using certain words or expressions in oral speech in order to avoid generic masculine terms while referring to mixed-gender groups of people.

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