Exchange with visiting scientists from Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache on gender and language

On 23 and 24 April, we had the pleasure of hosting Carolin Müller-Spitzer from the Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS) and the University of Mannheim. She gave an overview of her team’s research on “Gender-inclusive language in German. Empirical analyses and linguistic evaluation”. The research group strives to contribute to the debate on language and gender by grounding their work in corpus linguistics, thus sharing sound empirical knowledge with the research community and the general public. For example, they found that less than 1% of words would be affected if German press texts were rewritten using gender-inclusive language. Further work addressed the risk that companies might use gender-inclusive language for ‘pinkwashing’, without this being a sign of concrete efforts towards gender equality. As far as German DAX companies are concerned, they found no evidence of this.

During the two-day meeting with Gender Dynamics and the members of the Institute for Applied Linguistics, we exchanged experiences and presented our research, publications and dissemination activities. We also explored possibilities for joint initiatives and projects in the future. While Professor Müller-Spitzer is now back in Mannheim, her PhD student Sara Corain will stay in Bolzano for a few weeks at the Institute for Applied Linguistics. We are looking forward to further exchanges!