Four Years Later: Is Gender-Inclusive Language Still a Change in Progress?
Document Type
Paper Presentation
Presenter Language
English
Research Area
Language and gender; Variation and change
Location
MBSC Council Room 306
Start Date
18-10-2024 9:00 AM
End Date
18-10-2024 9:30 AM
Abstract
Samples (2024) questioned how the frequency of the Spanish gender morphemes –o, –a, –@, –x, and –e in Twitter (X) posts has changed over time and concluded that the increasing use of the gender-inclusive morphemes –@, –x, and –efrom the years 2010 to 2018 is suggestive of a linguistic change in progress. The present paper examines how this trend was borne out in the year 2022 and asks the following three research questions:
(1) Did Twitter (X) users continue to increase their employment of gender-inclusive morphemes in the term nosotr_s?
(2) Have they at all decreased their rate of traditional morpheme (i.e., –o and –a) use?
(3) Are they still moving in the direction of a language change?
1058 Twitter tokens from the 1-10 of each month of 2022 were manually extracted and analyzed.
Overall, the results show a higher frequency of the traditional masculine morpheme –o but lower frequencies of traditional masculine morpheme –a, compared to the years 2014 and 2018. The opposite trends emerged when the years 2010 and 2022 were compared: a lower rate of masculine morphemes and a higher rate of feminine morphemes. While the use of the gender-inclusive morphemes –@, –x, and –e increased from 2010 to 2018, it decreased in 2022. Despite these differences, these results did not reach significance at the 0.05 level.
Thus, the answers to the first research question is negative. Twitter users did not continue to increase their use of gender-inclusive language in 2022. Although they did produce fewer traditional feminine morphemes in 2022, as asked in the second research question, they utilized more traditional masculine morphemes.
These results suggest that the employment of traditional gender morphemes is still prevalent among Twitter users in Spain and that gender-inclusive morphemes have not yet replaced their traditional counterparts. Indeed, the Instituto de Ingeniería de Conocimiento (2023) determined that gender-inclusive morphemes occurred in only 1.19% of the Tweets it examined from April 3-23, 2020. Because the differences in morpheme frequency were not significant, it cannot be said that the 2022 data point in the direction of continued language change (research question 3). Rather, gender-inclusive morphemes appear to be a nominal morpheme variant (Yakovenko 2019).
longer abstract with selected references
Four Years Later: Is Gender-Inclusive Language Still a Change in Progress?
MBSC Council Room 306
Samples (2024) questioned how the frequency of the Spanish gender morphemes –o, –a, –@, –x, and –e in Twitter (X) posts has changed over time and concluded that the increasing use of the gender-inclusive morphemes –@, –x, and –efrom the years 2010 to 2018 is suggestive of a linguistic change in progress. The present paper examines how this trend was borne out in the year 2022 and asks the following three research questions:
(1) Did Twitter (X) users continue to increase their employment of gender-inclusive morphemes in the term nosotr_s?
(2) Have they at all decreased their rate of traditional morpheme (i.e., –o and –a) use?
(3) Are they still moving in the direction of a language change?
1058 Twitter tokens from the 1-10 of each month of 2022 were manually extracted and analyzed.
Overall, the results show a higher frequency of the traditional masculine morpheme –o but lower frequencies of traditional masculine morpheme –a, compared to the years 2014 and 2018. The opposite trends emerged when the years 2010 and 2022 were compared: a lower rate of masculine morphemes and a higher rate of feminine morphemes. While the use of the gender-inclusive morphemes –@, –x, and –e increased from 2010 to 2018, it decreased in 2022. Despite these differences, these results did not reach significance at the 0.05 level.
Thus, the answers to the first research question is negative. Twitter users did not continue to increase their use of gender-inclusive language in 2022. Although they did produce fewer traditional feminine morphemes in 2022, as asked in the second research question, they utilized more traditional masculine morphemes.
These results suggest that the employment of traditional gender morphemes is still prevalent among Twitter users in Spain and that gender-inclusive morphemes have not yet replaced their traditional counterparts. Indeed, the Instituto de Ingeniería de Conocimiento (2023) determined that gender-inclusive morphemes occurred in only 1.19% of the Tweets it examined from April 3-23, 2020. Because the differences in morpheme frequency were not significant, it cannot be said that the 2022 data point in the direction of continued language change (research question 3). Rather, gender-inclusive morphemes appear to be a nominal morpheme variant (Yakovenko 2019).