The use of gender-fair language in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland: A contrastive, corpus-based study

Abstract

Gender-fair language (GFL) is currently a widely debated topic in the German-speaking context, yet research on the subject is rather scarce with limited comparative data for the three largest German-speaking countries, Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. The present study seeks to address this research gap with a corpus-based analysis of the use of different forms of GFL over the last two decades in these three countries. Given that the language used by journalists reaches a vast target audience, the corpus for this study consists of some of the most widely circulated and politically diverse daily newspapers in the three countries. The results of the study not only show differences in the frequency of GFL in the three countries, with Austria using GFL most frequently, but also indicate a diverging usage trend from 2021 onwards and variations in the strategies of GFL used. Furthermore, the political orientation of the selected newspapers is not predictive of the frequency of GFL and the strategies used.