Gender-inclusive language in university communication: a contrastive analysis of gender-inclusive guidelines in German, Italian, and English

Abstract

This article offers a contrastive examination of gender-inclusive language guidelines issued by universities in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, and the United Kingdom. Drawing on a corpus of 287 institutional documents – 122 in German, 34 in Italian, and 133 in English – the study identifies and quantifies specification and neutralization strategies recommended for administrative and pedagogical discourse. After manual annotation, strategies were coded into a database, enabling statistical comparison across languages and nations. Results show that German-speaking institutions favor gender-marked neographies and pair forms, whereas Italian guidelines privilege binary splitting and feminine derivation, with neographies largely proscribed. English documents overwhelmingly promote lexical and pronominal neutralization, including singular they and neopronouns, and eschew specification entirely. Legal framing – especially the recognition of a non-binary civil status in Germany – emerges as a key predictor of neography uptake. Despite divergent prescriptions, all guidelines condemn the generic masculine and seek inclusive representational equity. The paper concludes that cross-linguistic variation in inclusive strategies reflects structural properties of the languages, local legal contexts, and institutional ideologies, and argues for heightened intercultural dialogue in developing future policies. These findings contribute to sociolinguistic theory by evidencing how macro-social variables interact with grammatical typology to shape emergent language planning norms and practices.