Shifting social norms as a driving force for linguistic change: Struggles about language and gender in the German Bundestag

This paper focuses on language change based on shifting social norms, in particular with regard to the debate on language and gender. It is a recurring argument in this debate that language develops "naturally" and that "severe interventions" - such as gender-inclusive language is often claimed to be - in the allegedly "organic" language system are inappropriate and even "dangerous". Such interventions are, however, not unprecedented. Socially motivated processes of language change are neither unusual nor new. We focus in our contribution on one important political-social space in Germany, the German Bundestag. Taking other struggles about language and gender in the plenaries of the Bundestag as a starting point, our article illustrates that language and gender has been a recurring issue in the German Bundestag since the 1980s. We demonstrate how this is reflected in linguistic practices of the Bundestag, by the use of a) designations for gays and lesbians; b) pair forms such as Bürgerinnen und Bürger (female and male citizens); and c) female forms of addresses and personal nouns ('Präsidentin' in addition to 'Präsident'). Lastly, we will discuss implications of these earlier language battles for the currently very heated debate about gender-inclusive language, especially regarding new forms with gender symbols like the asterisk or the colon (Lehrer*innen, Lehrer:innen; male*female teachers) which are intended to encompass all gender identities

Less than one percent of words would be affected by gender-inclusive language in German press texts

Research on gender and language is tightly knitted to social debates on gender equality and non-discriminatory language use. Psycholinguistic scholars have made significant contributions in this field. However, corpus-based studies that investigate these matters within the context of language use are still rare. In our study, we address the question of how much textual material would actually have to be changed if non-gender-inclusive texts were rewritten to be gender-inclusive. This quantitative measure is an important empirical insight, as a recurring argument against the use of gender-inclusive German is that it supposedly makes written texts too long and complicated. It is also argued that gender-inclusive language has negative effects on language learners. However, such effects are only likely if gender-inclusive texts are very different from those that are not gender-inclusive. In our corpus-linguistic study, we manually annotated German press texts to identify the parts that would have to be changed. Our results show that, on average, less than 1% of all tokens would be affected by gender-inclusive language. This small proportion calls into question whether gender-inclusive German presents a substantial barrier to understanding and learning the language, particularly when we take into account the potential complexities of interpreting masculine generics

Komposita mit den relationalen Zweitgliedern "Gatte" und "Gattin" – eine korpusbasierte Studie aus genderlinguistischer Perspektive

In diesem Beitrag werden Komposita mit den relationalen Zweitgliedern Gatte und Gattin aus genderlinguistischer Perspektive untersucht, basierend auf manuell annotiertem zeitungssprachlichen Korpusmaterial. Frauen werden im analysierten Korpus ca. 12-mal häufiger in ihrer ehelichen Rolle versprachlicht als Männer. Statistische Analysen zeigen, dass sie dabei systematisch in ein possessives Verhältnis zum Ehemann gesetzt werden (Arztgattin = Gattin eines Arztes), während Ehemänner in den untersuchten Komposita tendenziell doppelt individualisiert werden (Arztgatte = Gatte, der Arzt ist). Neben den Zweitgliedern geben auch die Genera der beiden Konstituenten Aufschluss über die kodierte Bedeutungsrelation: Genusgleichheit (Kanzlergatte) führt zu einer qualifizierenden, Genusdivergenz (Kanzleringatte) zu einer possessiven Lesart. Die Analyse belegt außerdem die Existenz movierter Kompositumserstglieder – diese sind sogar die häufigste Form zur Benennung weiblicher Personen im Erstglied. Trotzdem herrscht bei der Bezugnahme auf Frauen eine größere Formenvarianz als bei Männern, welche fast ausschließlich mit maskulinen Erstgliedern versprachlicht werden. Damit zeigt die Studie, wie genderlinguistische Perspektiven auch im Bereich der Wortbildung einen neuen Analysezugang bilden.This study examines compounds with the relational second elements Gatte (‘husband’) and Gattin (‘wife’) from a gender-linguistic perspective, based on manual annotations of material from a presscorpus. In the analysed corpus, women are referred to in their marital roles 12 times more often than men. Statistical analyses show that they are systematically put into a possessive relation to their husband (Arztgattin = ‘a doctor’s wife’), while husbands tend to be individualised twice within the analysed compounds (Arztgatte = ‘a husband who is also a doctor’). Besides the second elements, the grammatical gender of the two constituents provides information about the meaning relations within the compounds: if both have the same grammatical gender (Kanzlergatte), a qualifying meaning is encoded; if they have differing grammatical genders (Kanzleringatte), a possessive reading is triggered. The analysis also provides evidence for the existence of feminised first elements –they are even the most common form to refer to women with the first element. However, reference to women is subject to a high degree of formal variance compared to men, who are almost exclusively referred to with masculine forms. Thus, the study shows how gender-linguistic perspectives can contribute new analytical approaches to word formation processes

Prohibitive and its relation with the imperative

The prohibitive is typically defined as the negative imperative, i.e. it “implies making someone not do something, having the effect of forbidding, preventing, or restricting” (Aikhenvald, 2017: 3). This chapter focuses on the formation of the prohibitive in the languages of Daghestan and neighboring regions, analyzing two different aspects of the morphological coding: first, the verb form (especially whether it is an imperative form or not), and second, the type of negation marker/affix used. Based on this, the general encoding types are deduced. Additionally, the phonological form of the markers is shortly analyzed

Gender-fair language on the websites of German, Austrian, Swiss and South Tyrolean cities. Elektronische Ressource

Annotated dataset consisting of personal designations found on websites of 42 German, Austrian, Swiss and South Tyrolean cities. Our goal is to re-evaluate the websites every year in order to see how the use of gender-fair language develops over time. The dataset contains coordinates for the creation of map material

Gender-fair language on the websites of German, Austrian, Swiss and South Tyrolean cities

Annotated dataset consisting of personal designations found on websites of 42 German, Austrian, Swiss and South Tyrolean cities. Our goal is to re-evaluate the websites every year in order to see how the use of gender-fair language develops over time. The dataset contains coordinates for the creation of map material