Gender-inclusive Language in Twitter

Abstract

Abstract: Gender-inclusive language serves to recognize women and people with non-binary gender identities as part of the primary group, and it has been seen in various languages, including Arabic (Berger 2019), English (Berger 2019; Mathews 1995), Hebrew (Berger 2019), Portuguese (Secretaria de Comunicação 2021), Spanish (Berger 2019; Guzmán Stein 2004), and Swedish (Berger 2019; Gustafsson Sendén et al. 2015), among others (Berger 2019). In Spanish, for example, speakers exchange the generic masculine – o gender morpheme for morphemes like –@, – x , or – e . Through an analysis of the use of these morphemes in the word nosotros by Twitter users in or around Madrid, it is argued that a language change based on analogy to non-gender-marked forms such as estudiante and inteligente is in progress (Campbell 2013; Gubb 2013; Moreno, p.c.; Pesce and Etchezahar 2019). Data are manually extracted from tweets posted during the first through the tenth of each month in the years 2010, 2014, and 2018. The data reveal that no inclusive morphemes were used in 2010, but that by 2018, the most frequent gender-inclusive morpheme was –@, – x was the second-most frequent, and – e was the least frequent. The frequency of these morphemes corresponds with their novelty: – @ was created first, and – e is the most recent. Future studies should examine uses of gender-inclusive language in later years, as well as the demographic characteristics of the Twitter users.