The Speculative Language

Publication Design

2019.11

Language is a tool for communication between people, as well as a mirror to convey information, expresses ideas, and reflects changes in social life and ideas. Therefore, the existence and change of language can be said to be in line with the existence and change of society. Among them, the creation of new words that represent the fastest change in society is the core of vocabulary change.

The part that has been highlighted is Chinese character means woman. It was modelled after a woman kneeling on the floor. This character can also be used as “bushou” or radical, and in some cases, the characters with this element imply some negative meanings.

2049:

My team and I conceived a post-gender East Asian society, in which homosexual marriage is acceptable commonly. Benefiting from the development of reproductive medicine and other science technology (such as genetic editing, artificial uterus), the newborn infant is no longer relative directly to sexual activity between male and female. The traditional parent-child family structure still exists, but the homosexual family is common as well.

New Chinese Characters For the New Society

Language is the symbol of civilisation. With language, we communicate with each other, share what we are thinking. Meanwhile, thinking gets fixed down with language. Due to the traditional impression of the patriarchal-fuss society for thousands of year, the implication of gender in Chinese characters are obvious, and some of them show stereotypes about gender. These gender-relatives characters are no longer suitable for the communication needs of post-gender society. To meet this demand, firstly we change the third person pronoun in Chinese and created a neutral 3rd person. At the same time, we replaced some of the words which have strong gender discrimination. Because of the existence of the homosexual family, the titles of father and mother may not suitable to all the family, thus we built a new system to meet the asking of new family structure. The original gender-related radicals are replaced by a gender-neutral one.

We created a new radical, which means a radical character to form other characters. This radical doesn’t indicate any gender, but humanity itself. As you can see, there are two small strokes which mean human in Chinese, and the other character which means sky. So it shows all humans under the sky are equal and should not be discriminated against. Based on this new radical, we designed new characters to solve the problem.

Exercise Book

We design this textbook for primary school students in 2049. What they will learn is Gender-equal characters without any reference to a particular gender. And also, we design some games to help pupils learning Chinese, such as prefix sliders at the end of the textbook. Considering the age, we choose the family title as the context.