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PreprintCited by 5Gender Studies in LanguageGender Politics and RepresentationLinguistic Variation and Morphology

The evolution of gender-inclusive language. Evidence from the German Bundestag, 1949-2021

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Stecker, Christian, Müller, Jochen, Blätte, Andreas, Leonhardt, Christoph·2021
DOI 10.31219/osf.io/fcsmz
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Abstract

Gender-inclusive language is an important issue in the struggle for political equality between women and men. Parliaments are an important site in this struggle as they both reflect and shape gender-relations in society. Based on a novel high-quality corpus of all its debates we study the evolution of gender-fair language in the German parliament, Bundestag, between 1949 and 2021. As a "gender language" with a grammatical gender, German offers ideal conditions to inspect semantically symmetric male and female forms of personal nouns. Our analysis of more than 2.5 million occurrences of 1,600 lemmas of personal nouns reveals that female forms had been virtually non-existent in debates before experiencing a dramatic increase since the 1980s. This evolution in language use has been induced by the gender, partisan affiliation and generational affiliation of MPs.

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  • In 2017, with the AfD joining the Bundestag, the contrast between political orientations became even more pronounced, as this party used almost no feminine occupational terms.

    “In 2017, the contrast between political orientations became even more pronounced with the AfD joining the Bundestag, as this party used almost no feminine occupational terms.”

    From What affects people’s use of and attitudes toward gender-inclusive language? A literature review (2025) · cites this paper as Stecker et al. (2021)

    The Conclusion (page unavailable) reports party-political differences and an exceptionally low level of gender-inclusive language in the AfD. The Results (page unavailable) include the AfD in the 2017 legislative-term comparison. Our copy does not specifically establish that the contrast became more pronounced in 2017 or report an AfD-specific finding for occupational terms, rather than personal nouns generally. (LLM, conf=0.82)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

  • In the German parliament, more left and centre-left parties (Die Linke, Die Grünen and SPD) used gender-inclusive language more frequently than centre-right (FDP) and conservative parties (CDU/CSU).

    “with more left and centre-left parties (Die Linke, Die Grünen and SPD) using it more frequently than centre-right (FDP) and conservative parties (CDU/CSU).”

    From What affects people’s use of and attitudes toward gender-inclusive language? A literature review (2025) · cites this paper as Stecker et al. (2021)

  • An increase in gender-inclusive language use was found in the German parliament since 1980.

    “An increase in gender-inclusive language use was found since 1980”

    From What affects people’s use of and attitudes toward gender-inclusive language? A literature review (2025) · cites this paper as Stecker et al. (2021)

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Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Stecker, C., Müller, J., Blätte, A., & Leonhardt, C.
Affiliations
Technische Universität Darmstadt (DE)
ORCID
Stecker, Christian
Publisher
Center for Open Science
Published
2021-07-13
DOI
10.31219/osf.io/fcsmz
OpenAlex
W4206318702
Cited by
5
References
1
Citations by year
2026: 2 · 2025: 1 · 2024: 2
Type
posted content
Language
en
Open access
Licence
Locations
  • OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints) (submittedVersion, public-domain)
  • OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints) (submittedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Gender Studies › Gender Studies in Language
  • Social Sciences › Gender Studies › Gender Politics and Representation
  • Social Sciences › Linguistics and Language › Linguistic Variation and Morphology
Keywords
gender-inclusive language, grammatical gender, Bundestag, women's political representation, language change, partisan affiliation, gender equality

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