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

TL;DR

This study quantitatively shows that less than 1% of words in German press texts would need to change for gender-inclusive language, challenging claims that it significantly complicates texts or impedes language learning.

Contribution

It provides the first corpus-based, empirical measurement of the actual textual changes needed for gender-inclusive German press texts.

Findings

Less than 1% of tokens affected by gender-inclusive language

Gender-inclusive texts are not substantially longer or more complex

Minimal impact on language comprehension and learning

Abstract

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.