The University of Barcelona (UB) takes a step to improve the quality of administrative prose. In an instruction signed by the Secretary General, the Vice-Rector for Equality and Gender and the Vice-Rector for Institutional Relations, Communication and Linguistic Policy, the use of the unmarked gender, that is, the “generic masculine” is restored. The style books of some institutions establish a split wording, which not only burdens the already not very agile texts with administrative prose, but often causes inconsistencies of all kinds. The sense of bureaucratic newspeak spreads through the institutional bubble in parallel to its disconnection from life on the street.
That is why it is unusual to read that the unmarked form will be used again "in normative provisions, when references to positions and professions do not allow agile and natural inclusive strategies" as collective words. The instruction also establishes the cases in which the discretionary use of double forms (masculine and feminine at the same time) in the singular is foreseen to make women visible.
As was to be expected, the instruction has provoked some contrary reaction, but in general it has been well received by the university community, the main victim of the pleonastic and hyperbatonic prose of the bureaucrats, a difficult, uncomfortable reading mess that expels the reader of the text three times per paragraph In reality, this instruction full of common sense is the logical consequence of a collective book by dozens of authors that the late Dr. Carme Junyent coordinated in 2021. The title is unequivocal, We are women, we are linguists, we are many and we say enough, and the subtitle, clarifying: "Enough incoherent and confusing texts. We change the world and the language will change".
