Language is supposed to be a neutral tool, a tool for objective communication. Subjectivity and bias always depend on the speaker, on the person using the language. But it is also true that the language when generalizing usually uses the masculine gender and thus ignores the feminine gender. Many proposals have been made to improve this situation. But are they effective and are they practicable?

We want to discuss all this together with our guest and expert María Carme Junyent. M. Carme Junyent was born in Masquefa and is a full professor of general linguistics at the University of Barcelona. She studied philology at the University of Barcelona and completed her training at the Universities of Marburg and Cologne in Germany, at the University of California in the United States, and received a doctorate from the University of Barcelona. She is a member of the Grup d’ Estudi de Llengües Amenaçades (GELA) and also of the Grup de Lingüistes per la Diversitat (GLIDI).

She has recently published, together with the journalist Bel Zavalla, “El futur del català depèn de tu” and together with the author Pere Comellas “Els colors de la neu: Les llengües, les persones i el món.” She has published numerous works and the most recent are: “El català, la llengua effervescent” and “Som dones, som lingüístes, som moltes i diem prou.”

The latter, the author synthesizes in a single sentence “Seriously if we change the language we will change the world? Let’s talk about it.”

Timetable
19:00 Welcome
19:05 Language and gender (talk in Catalan)
19:25 Debate among all attendees
20:30 Networking
21:00 End of the event

Language
The talk will be given in Catalan. In the debate, opinions can be expressed and questions asked in both Spanish and Catalan.

Location
The event will take place in the auditorium of our sponsor, Casa Seat at Paseo de Gracia 109 (corner of Diagonal). Health regulations will be respected, in order to maintain the necessary distance the capacity is limited.

Tickets
Tickets are free. We will open registration about ten days before the event. We will also notify our entire community through our newsletter.

About TEDxBarcelonaSalon:
At our TEDxBarcelonaSalon events we foster networking, dialog and the discussion among all members of TEDxBarcelona. In order to achieve this we meet once a month and listen to an interesting talk. After watching the talk we discuss about the presented subject. Here the list of past Salon events.