Explizite und implizite Haltungskundgaben in Leitfadeninterviews zum Gendern im Deutschen

Abstract

In the field of person references, there are currently differing views and attitudes in German-speaking countries regarding the relationship between grammatical and social gender and how this is reflected in speech and writing. This article focuses on “(in)certainty, (in)consistency, and a variety of means” (Dannerer/Vergeiner 2019) in the context of normative conflicts and subjective preferences surrounding the phenomenon of “gendering” in German. It provides insights from 36 semi-guided, qualitative interviews with individuals in non-academic professions who live in southern Germany (on this group cf. Kotthoff 2023) or in Austria. The analysis, which is content-analytical, sequential, and informed by “grounded theory,” focuses on explicit or implicit expressions of stances (in the sense of Jaffe 2009). In many interviews, strong modalisations of the interviewee’s own position are evident; therefore, the implicit communication of vagueness and ambiguity is also coded alongside the explicit expressions of stance. These are related to the linguistic reflections demanded of the interviewees and the recipient design of their statements addressed to student interviewers to whom they attribute a stance in favor of gendering.