by Tanisha Pandey
Have you ever found yourself back home for the holidays and a relative suddenly launches into a familiar complaint about gender-neutral language? The argument tends to go something like this: they do not understand why young people insist on “inventing” new forms or why established languages such as English, German, or French should be “changed” to include just a “handful of individuals”. Conversations like these are often emotionally charged but can reveal something fundamental about how society and language shape each other.
To understand why gender-neutral language has become a point of contention, it helps to start with a basic distinction, namely, that between sex and gender. While sex is typically treated as an almost binary classification rooted in bodily characteristics (McConnell-Ginet 2020; Fausto-Sterling 2000), gender is neither fixed nor predetermined at birth. It is performed and socialized, i.e., shaped by how we move through the world, how we present ourselves, and how others interpret those presentations. For some, the distinction between gender identity and gender expression is additionally relevant. While gender identity is the label individuals claim for themselves, gender expression or performance encompasses the practices through which one is read as gendered: clothing, hairstyle, and bodily comportment.
Research suggests that just as social life can shape language practices, language used to address the said social domain can also shape lived experiences. For example, masculine pronouns (he/him/his), especially when used “generically”, i.e., to refer to everyone, do not get interpreted generically at all. Studies such as Redl et al. (2021) demonstrate that Dutch masculine generics evoke male referents and not their ungendered, generic counterparts that are meant by it. Similar work by Horvath and Sczesny (2016) shows that pronouns influence perceptions of who is suitable for leadership roles and who is excluded from that definition. Stout and Dasgupta (2011) find that women reading job descriptions containing the generic masculine pronoun (he) report lower motivation, a reduced sense of association, and weaker identification with the job. In other words, pronouns are not neutral; they are informed by and reproduce social biases.
Some who can appreciate the need for equality might instead worry about the purity of languages. The critique that gender identities are increasingly diverse, but grammatical gender is not, stems from such concerns of politicized language change. Nevertheless, political motivations behind language change are neither new nor unusual. All language changes, constantly. Variation is the norm, and socially driven shifts are how speakers navigate constantly changing social landscapes, as McConnell-Ginet (2020) reminds us, just the English language offers evidence of a long history of such shifts. The now-unremarkable singular you, developed from a plural form, retaining plural verb agreement despite becoming prescriptively acceptable in singular contexts, is an example of such change.
Gender-inclusive forms are often held in contempt for making language harder to process. Yet empirical evidence shows otherwise. Verhaegen et al. (2025), studying Dutch gender-neutral pronouns, find no negative impact on text comprehensibility. Although some individual combinations, such as die-die-diens reduce text appreciation, the overall pattern indicates a growing familiarity and viability of plural forms as an inclusive strategy.
An emerging body of literature examines the adoption of and attitudes toward gender-inclusive language, especially in English, but also more and more in German. One notable example of such research is recent MA project-work conducted at the Centre for the Study of Language and Society. In her work from 2024, Elisa Moor investigated whether short-term familiarization with the Genderstern (the use of an asterisk in occupational nouns, e.g., Sprecher*in) affects comprehension (“reading costs”). Drawing on a self-paced reading experiment, Moor showed that the Genderstern is more difficult to process than the generic masculine but facilitates subsequent processing of feminine anaphor resolution (more gender-inclusive language). Her findings further suggest that exposure may ease processing of the Genderstern. Finally, social factors such as age, education, and gender influenced the processing of items or became relevant through interactions with other variables. Research of this kind provides valuable empirical insight for ongoing sociolinguistic work on inclusive language in German.
References:
Butler, J. (1988). Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory. Theatre Journal, 40(4), 519–531. https://doi.org/10.2307/3207893
Fausto-Sterling, A. (2000). Sexing the Body: Gender, Politics and the Construction of Sexuality. Basic Books.
Horvath, L. K., & Sczesny, S. (2016). Reducing women’s lack of fit with leadership positions? Effects of the wording of job advertisements. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 25(2), 316–328. https://doi.org/10.1080/1359432X.2015.1067611
McConnell-Ginet, S. (2020). Words Matter: Meaning and Power. Cambridge University Press; Cambridge Core. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108641302
Moor, E. (2024). The influence of short-term familiarization with the “Genderstern” on the processing cost of reading inclusive language - A Self-Paced Reading Experiment (University of Bern, thesis awarded 2024)
Redl, T., Frank, S. L., Swart, P. de, & Hoop, H. de. (2021). The male bias of a generically-intended masculine pronoun: evidence from eye-tracking and sentence evaluation. PLOS ONE, 16(4), e0249309. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249309
Stout, J. & Dasgupta, N. (2011). When He Doesn't Mean You: Gender-Exclusive Language as Ostracism. Personality & social psychology bulletin. 37. 757-69. 10.1177/0146167211406434.
Verhaegen, H., Van Hoof, S., Van Herck, R., Gabriel, U., Gygax, P., & Decock, S. (2025). The effect of Dutch gender-neutral pronouns on perceived text quality: generic reference in employee guidelines. Applied Psycholinguistics, 46, e30. doi:10.1017/S0142716425100167
