Politically correct

Though I wouldn´t call it a women´s rights or a feminist movement, there is a need to be more politically correct when referring to women in Spain. This is not too much of a problem in English, but in Spanish all nouns and adjectives are either masculine or feminine. Nearly all nouns that end in an "O" are masculine in Spanish, and its gender partner would be the "A" for females. Therefore, when talking to a group of friends, one would have to choose between the words amigos, and amigas. Traditionally in Spain, this group would be called amigos, so long as there was at least one male. 1:9 ratio in favor of females? Shucks. Women would be out of luck, the word would still be amigos.

Times are changing however. Spanish is a continually changing language, especially in the agreement realm. Depending on the word, the plural term could be determined by the majority of the group, not simply the presence of a single male. Or, to make matters even more complicated, they would use both words, I am going out with my amigos and amigas. It elongates quite a bit. In the written language they are surpassing this barrier with a symbol we already commonly use. Amig@s. The "at" symbol qualifies as the neutered character, as it represents quite well both the "O" and "a".

This whole argument I am still a bit confused by, as gender of a word is not necessarily directly correlated to a sex. Picture for example is feminine, while eyes are masculine. Why? Beats me. But I know that all words are not related to sex, and therefore if we removed sex from this equation and simply focused on gender of the word, as I was taught I should learn, life here in Spain wouldn´t have to be complicated, and their dictionary wouldn´t have to be continually growing.