Unbiased gender linguistics

An introduction to gender linguistics which combines comprehensibility with academic standards: Professor Dr. Helga Kotthoff and Dr. Claudia Schmidt, German Studies linguists at the University of Freiburg’s Deutsches Seminar, have collaborated with Professor Dr. Damaris Nübling of the Deutsches Institut at the University of Mainz to produce a book for students and teachers of German linguistics and other modern languages. “In hardly any other discipline are the levels of academic research and public knowledge so far apart as in the area of gender linguistics,” Nübling and Kotthoff say. “We have published this book to help change that.”

The authors stress that their work does not follow any language policy agenda - rather, the researchers have tried to take as unbiased a position as possible. At the same time, they explore language policy solutions because they dominate the public discussion and have already had visible effects in the form of changing language. The introductory work discusses all areas of systematic linguistics as well as sociolinguistics and spoken language linguistics. The spectrum goes from differences in voice, to the complex of genus - sexus - gender and given names, to the construction of gender in dictionaries, to the differences in conversations, even in jokes and in institutional communication. It concludes with a chapter on the new media, in which the authors say genderized self-portrayals are increasingly found. A comprehensive bibliography provides the foundations for further academic pursuit of the topic.

Publication:
Kotthoff, H./Nübling, D./Schmidt, C. (2018): Genderlinguistik. Eine Einführung in Sprache, Gespräch und Geschlecht. Tübingen