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In German, a medial capital I (German: Binnen-I) is a non-standard, mixed case typographic convention used to indicate gender inclusivity for nouns having to do with people, by using a capital letter 'I' inside the word (Binnenmajuskel, literally "internal capital", i.e. camel case) surrounded by lower-case letters. An example is the word LehrerInnen ("teachers", both male and female). With a lower case I in that position, Lehrerinnen is just the standard word for "female teachers".
The Binnen-I is a non-standard solution for how to economically express a position of gender equality in one German word, with an expression that would otherwise require three words. Since most English nouns (excluding pronouns) have no grammatical gender, words such as teacher(s), student(s), professor(s), and so on, can be used without implying the gender of the being(s) to which the noun refers. The situation in German, however, is more difficult since all nouns have one of three grammatical genders, masculine, feminine, or neuter.
When used with a noun designating a group of people, a Binnen-I indicates that the intended meaning of the word is both the feminine as well as the masculine forms, without having to write out both forms of the noun. It is formed from the feminine form of a noun containing the -in suffix (singular) or -innen suffix (plural). For example, Lehrerinnen (women teachers) would be written LehrerInnen, with the meaning (men and women) teachers, without having to write out both gender forms, or use the lexically unmarked masculine.
Other gender-inclusive typographic conventions exist in German that perform a similar function, such as the gender star.
Part of the academic ferment in the United States in second-wave feminism in the 1970s was the attention paid to gender bias in language, [1] including "the uncovering of the gendered nature of many linguistic rules and norms" and how the use of language could be analyzed from a feminist viewpoint. [2] Studies showed the sexually biased use of language including "he" as a generic pronoun meaning both males and females [3] [4] and how this wasn't just an outgrowth of natural language evolution but in fact was enforced by prescriptivist (male) grammarians. [4] [5] By the 1980s and 1990s, feminist critique of language had spread to Germany [6] and other countries.
German has three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. With the exception of some relationship nouns (mother, father, daughter, etc.) that are tied to the sex of the person, the gender of a noun is arbitrary, and can be any one of the three; [7] [lower-alpha 3] for example, masculine: Knoblauch (garlic); feminine: Steckrübe (turnip), Person (person); or neuter: Haus (house), Mädchen (girl).
In German, as to a lesser extent in English, some nouns designating people come in masculine/feminine pairs; in German they are often distinguished by an -in suffix in the feminine (Schauspieler/Schauspielerin), where English sometimes uses -ess (actor/actress). Similarly, in both languages the feminine form of such nouns is semantically marked and can only refer to a woman in each language, whereas the masculine form is unmarked and can designate either a man, if known, or an unknown person of indeterminate sex. In the plural, German generally has separate plurals for masculine and feminine (Juristen/Juristinnen: male attorneys/female attorneys).
In referring to a mixed (male/female) group of people, historically one would use the generic masculine, for example, Kollegen (masc. pl.; "colleagues"). To make it clear that both genders are included, one could use a three word phrase with the masculine and feminine versions of the noun joined by und ("and"), e.g. Kolleginnen und Kollegen (women colleagues and male colleagues).
At the end of the 1970s, groundbreaking work created the field of German feminist linguistics [lower-alpha 5] and critiqued both the inherent structure and usage of German on the one hand, and on the other, men's and women's language behavior, and concluded that German is antagonistic towards women ( frauenfeindlich ), for example, in the use of the generic masculine form when referring to mixed groups which makes women have no representation in the language, mirrors a "Man's world," and makes it seem like students, professors, employees, bosses, politicians, every group spoken about—is male, and women were invisible in the patterns of speech; and went on to say that language doesn't only mirror reality, it creates it. [1] [8] [9]
The use of medial capital I in Germany in this sense dates to the 1980s, in response to activism by German feminists for orthographic changes to promote gender equality in German writing. Some of this was called Frauendeutsch (women's German).
It is a solution to a problem of word economy: how do you avoid saying a three-word compound, e.g., Lehrer und Lehrerinnen (male teachers and female teachers) when you just want to say teachers in German? There are four methods, of varying levels of acceptance: [10]
In 1990, this usage caused a kerfuffle in the Landtag of North Rhine-Westphalia, when an official complaint was lodged by the chair of the Free Democratic Party against the Green Party, who had used some words with medial capital I in some of their parliamentary motions, saying that it was "incorrect according to the German language". The President of the Landtag responded by declaring that printed documents destined to be distributed throughout the state had to follow the official Duden language standard, until such time that the Duden accepted the capital I. The same year, the Wiesbaden Magistrate recommended the use of medial capital I for municipal office use, and prohibited the use of purely masculine terminology. The Wiesbaden women's affairs officer said that this had already been standard usage by the mayor and by some departments and agencies by 1990. [11]
Like French, Spanish, and other languages, but unlike English, the German language has a language academy, the Rat für deutsche Rechtschreibung [12] (Council for German Orthography) that watches over the language, and prescribes spelling and usage in official dictionaries and usage guides, and publishes occasional reforms to the standards like the 1996 spelling reform. The twelve-volume Duden dictionary and language reference is the officially recognized standard reference of the language, reflecting the views of the Spelling Council.
As Binnen-I is a typographic convention, it is seen in writing, and the internal capital I does not affect pronunciation of a word written with Binnen-I. However, in some cases, there is an attempt to indicate the convention in pronunciation, by using a glottal stop to create a momentary pause before the 'I'.[ citation needed ]
Other nonstandard typographic conventions exist in German for promoting gender-inclusivity, including use of a slash, parentheses, an underscore (called the gender gap [ de ]), or an asterisk (the gender star).[ citation needed ]
The gender star is another recent, nonstandard typographic convention influenced by feminist linguistics. This convention uses an asterisk before the –innen suffix to perform the same function as the medial capital 'I' does for Binnen-I. Since the asterisk resembles a star, when used for this function, the asterisk is referred to as the Gendersternchen; literally, "little gender star".
The gender star was put forward as an improvement on the Binnen-I, which was seen as too beholden to the gender binary, whereas the asterisk allowed other, non-binary genders to be included. [13] It started off being used in universities, was then adopted by public administrations and other institutions, and finally ended up being officially adopted by the Green party in 2015 as a way to avoid discrimination against transgender and intersex individuals, and others. Since 2017, it is part of the official regulations of the Berlin Senate. [14]
Gender star was named German Anglicism of the Year [ de ] in 2018. [15]
The gender star is pronounced by some people, who employ a glottal stop to mark it. (In situations other than this one, the stop sometimes occurs at the beginning of a word, and sometimes in the middle, but never before suffixes.) [13]
Luise Pusch criticized the gender star because it fails to get rid of the "linguistic invisibility of women". It symbolizes, as do the slash or the parenthesis typographic conventions, that women are "the second choice." [16]
In linguistics, a grammatical gender system is a specific form of a noun class system, where nouns are assigned to gender categories that are often not related to the real-world qualities of the entities denoted by those nouns. In languages with grammatical gender, most or all nouns inherently carry one value of the grammatical category called gender. The values present in a given language, of which there are usually two or three, are called the genders of that language.
In grammar, the vocative case is a grammatical case which is used for a noun that identifies a person being addressed or occasionally for the noun modifiers of that noun. A vocative expression is an expression of direct address by which the identity of the party spoken to is set forth expressly within a sentence. For example, in the sentence "I don't know, John," John is a vocative expression that indicates the party being addressed, as opposed to the sentence "I don't know John", in which "John" is the direct object of the verb "know".
A gender-specific job title is a name of a job that also specifies or implies the gender of the person performing that job. For example, in English, the job titles stewardess and seamstress imply that the person is female, whilst the corresponding job titles steward and seamster imply that the person is male. A gender-neutral job title, on the other hand, is one that does not specify or imply gender, such as firefighter or lawyer. In some cases, it may be debatable whether a title is gender-specific; for example, chairman appears to denote a male, but the title is also applied sometimes to women.
Föhr Frisian, or Fering, is the dialect of North Frisian spoken on the island of Föhr in the German region of North Frisia. Fering refers to the Fering Frisian name of Föhr, Feer. Together with the Öömrang, Söl'ring, and Heligolandic dialects, it forms part of the insular group of North Frisian dialects and it is very similar to Öömrang.
Catalan grammar, the morphology and syntax of the Catalan language, is similar to the grammar of most other Romance languages. Catalan is a relatively synthetic, fusional language.
Gender asymmetry is an aspect of the constructed international auxiliary language Esperanto which has been challenged by numerous proposals seeking to regularize both grammatical and lexical gender.
The original word base of Esperanto contained around 900 root words and was defined in Unua Libro, published by L. L. Zamenhof in 1887. In 1894, Zamenhof published the first Esperanto dictionary, Universala vortaro, which was written in five languages and supplied a larger set of root words, adding 1740 new words.
In the Dutch language, the gender of a noun determines the articles, adjective forms and pronouns that are used in reference to that noun. Gender is a complicated topic in Dutch, because depending on the geographical area or each individual speaker, there are either three genders in a regular structure or two genders in a dichotomous structure. Both are identified and maintained in formal language.
Gender-neutral language or gender-inclusive language is language that avoids reference towards a particular sex or gender. In English, this includes use of nouns that are not gender-specific to refer to roles or professions, formation of phrases in a coequal manner, and discontinuing the collective use of male or female terms. For example, the words policeman and stewardess are gender-specific job titles; the corresponding gender-neutral terms are police officer and flight attendant. Other gender-specific terms, such as actor and actress, may be replaced by the originally male term; for example, actor used regardless of gender. Some terms, such as chairman, that contain the component -man but have traditionally been used to refer to persons regardless of sex are now seen by some as gender-specific. An example of forming phrases in a coequal manner would be using husband and wife instead of man and wife. Examples of discontinuing the collective use of terms in English when referring to those with unknown or indeterminate gender as singular they, and using humans, people, or humankind, instead of man or mankind.
Gender neutrality in languages with grammatical gender is the usage of wording that is balanced in its treatment of the genders in a non-grammatical sense. For example, advocates of gender-neutral language challenge the traditional use of masculine nouns and pronouns when referring to two or more genders or to a person of an unknown gender in most Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic languages. This stance is often inspired by feminist ideas about gender equality. Gender neutrality is also used colloquially when one wishes to be inclusive of people who identify as non-binary genders or as genderless.
A genderless language is a natural or constructed language that has no distinctions of grammatical gender—that is, no categories requiring morphological agreement between nouns and associated pronouns, adjectives, articles, or verbs.
A system of grammatical gender, whereby every noun was treated as either masculine, feminine, or neuter, existed in Old English, but fell out of use during the Middle English period; therefore, Modern English largely does not have grammatical gender. Modern English lacks grammatical gender in the sense of all noun classes requiring masculine, feminine, or neuter inflection or agreement; however, it does retain features relating to natural gender with particular nouns and pronouns to refer specifically to persons or animals of one or other sexes and neuter pronouns for sexless objects. Also, in some cases, feminine pronouns are used by some speakers when referring to ships, to churches, and to nation states and islands.
The grammar of the Marathi language shares similarities with other modern Indo-Aryan languages such as Odia, Gujarati or Punjabi. The first modern book exclusively about the grammar of Marathi was printed in 1805 by Willam Carey.
Feminist language reform has proposed gender neutrality in languages with grammatical gender, such as Spanish. Grammatical gender in Spanish refers to how Spanish nouns are categorized as either masculine or feminine. As in other Romance languages—such as Portuguese, to which Spanish is very similar—a group of both men and women, or someone of unknown gender, is usually referred to by the masculine form of a noun and/or pronoun. Advocates of gender-neutral language modification consider this to be sexist, and exclusive of gender non-conforming people. They also stress the underlying sexism of words whose feminine form has a different, often less prestigious meaning. Some argue that a gender neutral Spanish can reduce gender stereotyping, deconstructing sexist gender roles and discrimination in the workplace.
Catalannouns are inflected for gender, and number. There is no case inflection. Articles and adjectives agree in gender and number with the noun they refer to.
Feminist language reform or feminist language planning refers to the effort, often of political and grassroots movements, to change how language is used to gender people, activities and ideas on an individual and societal level. This initiative has been adopted in countries such as Sweden, Switzerland and Australia.
All German nouns are included in one of three grammatical genders: masculine, feminine or neuter. While the gender often does not directly influence the plural forms of nouns, there are exceptions, particularly when it comes to people and professions.
In linguistics, feminization refers to the process of re-classifying nouns and adjectives which as such refer to male beings, including occupational terms, as feminine. This is done most of the time by adding inflectional suffixes denoting a female.
Luise F. Pusch is a German linguist. She is regarded as the co-founder of feminist linguistics in Germany, along with Senta Trömel-Plötz.
The gender star is a nonstandard typographic style used by some authors in gender-neutral language in German.