LingLunch : Ute Gabriel

Ute Gabriel (Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim)
Language Transformation in Search of Gender Fairness: The Example of Norwegian Bokmål

 Efforts to change gender-discriminatory language were a focus of the struggle for gender equality as early as the 1970s. These efforts grew out of debates about how language contributed to the perpetuation of distorted perceptions of female and male gender roles. Of the various alternatives to counteract linguistic discrimination, gender neutralization seems to prevail in Norwegian Bokmål. Most interestingly, suffixes previously used to refer to women disappeared in the early 1970s, and lexically masculine and feminine merge into a common gender (the former masculine). More recently, the increasing visibility of people who identify outside the gender binary has reinvigorated the debate about linguistic gender-discrimination leading to a third pronoun, hen, being added to the spelling norms for Bokmål in June 2022.

Against this background, I will present findings from social psychological and psycholinguistic studies on the comprehension of role names in Norwegian and present a study design for the empirical investigation of the use and comprehension of the pronoun "hen". Findings and considerations for future studies will be discussed in light of the tendency for gender neutralization in Norwegian.