Gender-inclusive language is an important issue in the struggle for political equality between women and men. Parliaments are an important site in this struggle as they both reflect and shape gender-relations in society. Based on a novel high-quality corpus of all its debates we study the evolution of gender-fair language in the German parliament, Bundestag, between 1949 and 2021. As a "gender language" with a grammatical gender, German offers ideal conditions to inspect semantically symmetric male and female forms of personal nouns. Our analysis of more than 2.5 million occurrences of 1,600 lemmas of personal nouns reveals that female forms had been virtually non-existent in debates before experiencing a dramatic increase since the 1980s. This evolution in language use has been induced by the gender, partisan affiliation and generational affiliation of MPs.

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ZusammenfassungDiese Research Note berichtet zentrale Ergebnisse des Open Expert Surveys 2021 (OES21). In diesem Expert:innen-Survey, der vor der Bundestagswahl 2021 durchgeführt wurde, haben mehr als 300 Politikwissenschaftler:innen die wichtigsten Parteien entlang zentraler politischer Sachfragen verortet und deren Wichtigkeit für die jeweilige Partei geschätzt. Der OES21 unterscheidet sich von gängigen Expert:innenbefragungen in zweierlei Hinsicht. Zum einen umfasst der Survey zahlreiche themenspezifische Items, die in anderen Befragungen bislang keine Beachtung fanden. Zum anderen ist die Anzahl der Expert:innen sehr hoch, wodurch Zusammenhänge in der Positionierung auf Ebene der einzelnen Expert:innen analysiert werden können.

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This chapter looks into discourses about migration in four European countries through the lens of cultural keywords (cf. Williams 1983; Bennett et al. 2005; Wierzbicka 1997); using Corpus Assisted Discourse Analysis, it compares the use of the keywords multicultural and multiculturalism. The study is based on corpora from British, French, German and Italian newspaper articles covering the time span 1998–2012, collated from one conservative and one left-liberal national newspaper in each language. Across the languages, the results show that the adjective multicultural is mostly descriptive of a state of affairs, typically without negative evaluation, and that the noun multiculturalism is associated with abstract concepts and points to a more negative discourse prosody, indicated by collocates such as ‘failure’.