Less than one percent of words would be affected by gender-inclusive
  language in German press texts
Carolin Müller-Spitzer Samira Ochs Alexander Koplenig Jan-Oliver Rüdiger Sascha Wolfer
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.