Schwa: why you should NOT use it.
Over the last few years you will have come to realize that various personalities in the world, especially on social media such as Instagram pages and people on Twitter, have begun to use symbols that are typically foreign to Italian; the asterisk, the snail and last but not least the "ə" (schwa). This is a historical period that has been going on for several years in which we have come to realize that in the past years we have always misrepresented different categories of people: homosexuals were once represented as stereotypical caricatures, in the United States they were always white actors impersonating non-white Anglo-Saxon roles, without mentioning the whole grotesque world of black faces and fervent racism not so old fashioned. Or even transgender people, if you remember some Italian films, even the masterpieces of Italian comedy, have always been represented as borderline people who must be kept isolated on the edge of society, somehow outcasts. And other categories of people who, despite having always been there, have never been represented, such as asexuals.
So what happens? That over time, mainly due to a greater sensitivity of the public and the authors, a fair representation of this category of people has been gradually introduced, or at least a representation that had never been there until now. But be careful, especially in the film industry, we do not talk about trans, black or asexual people to make people happy on Twitter, but to tell about the difficulties they have to face. Let me explain: for example, if you take Priscilla with Hugo Weaving and Guy Pearce as a drag queen who talks about the fear of the judgment of others, of hiding one's sexuality and of the sweetness denied to diverse people, you are telling about their difficulties, not about a queerbaiting shallow teen drama. And what are these struggles? They are conflicts, they are stories, interesting stories to tell about a world that has been very little explored. This is why a certain type of cinema focuses on these stories, because it is interesting not so much for the imposed politically correct, but for the story itself.
But why am I taking it so far, what does schwa have to do with it? Simply to explain the context, since we have a different sensitivity, we try to rebalance things. But let's just see what schwa is.
We have realized over the years that the Italian language has a problem, or rather two. The first is that Italian favors the masculine; if we find ourselves in front of a group of people and, for example, there are two boys and three girls for the over extended masculine we will have to refer to them as a collective in a masculine way. Only if the group is made up entirely of women will we be able to refer to them as feminine. Second problem, Italian has only two genders: masculine and feminine. But when we find ourselves in front of a non-binary person, who does not identify with either the male or the female gender, what do we do? (Here we take for granted the fact that the biological sexes are two, but that gender identity is a much broader spectrum of which the extremes are precisely male and female). While the first reason is more political, because when this over-extended masculine is recognized, a symbol of male domination is also inevitably recognized within the language (thus entering the feminist struggle for equality), the second is more practical. For this reason, to find something that put everyone on the same level involving males, females, non-binary people, we tried a little of everything. Putting the asterisk, the snail, not putting anything, and then we fell back on the 'ə'. Schwa is not a new thing, far from it, it derives from Hebrew and is the most important vowel in the Western world, the one dominated by English, but to understand it better we need the vowel scheme of the international phonetic alphabet.
Here are marked all the sounds of our vowels: at the top are the closed vowels, at the bottom are the open ones. In the center we find the ə, which is the most neutral of all. It is a strangled vowel which essentially means nothing, but which in English replaces the sound of vowels in many cases, such as the words "sir", or "country". But it is also used in Italian, very much in the south in the dialects but even in the normal dictionary lexicon. So, as we have seen, it is a topic that touches all of us, it is something intrinsic to our person, culture, language, and for this reason the controversy is so heated. Regardless of the political orientation, many oppose the schwa for a linguistic factor, despite having at heart the issue of inclusiveness and representation. The Accademia della Crusca also expressed itself in this regard with a long article in which it expounded various points, namely that:
1. in the Italian language the grammatical gender and the natural one do not always coincide, as for example with the word "guardia" which is feminine but often refers to a man
2. there are also words with common genres, dictated by the article in front of them, such as "la cantante" or "il cantante".
However, the problem remains the same, that of finding a neutral that works for everyone. Then we thought of Latin, but Crusca replied that Latin certainly has a neutral declension, but that is ever so rarely used to address people. In English all this is simpler, since there is a neutral already integrated in the language, "they / them", which however corresponds to a plural. Italian does not have an equally valid tool, nor a morphological structure suitable for supporting a hypothetical neutral. The Accademia della Crusca therefore says that undoubtedly languages change, have changed and will change, above all thanks to the populations who have proposed a change that has then undergone a process of normalization and bureaucratization, but that precisely these changes must be orally intelligible. For all these reasons, Crusca essentially said "no" to ə. Personally I agree with the Academy, I do not think it is a valid solution for the Italian language, although I am the first to fight for the rights of transgender people and for inclusiveness. On the other hand some people believe that the schwa could be the final solution and try to incorporate it in the everyday language, such as in Castelfranco Emilia, where the municipality and the major themselves made Facebook posts and posters around the town referring to the multitude of students as "studentə". Although they have received a very harsh judgement, going as far as getting death threats and blackmails. Eventually, an agreement will be found that is able to satisfy everyone, but until then the schwa, the asterisk and the snail I believe will remain part of the social media world alone.
