The Duden is about to be reformed.
The online dictionary is to be changed.
Linguistic research criticizes that.
Berlin - The online dictionary of the
Duden
publishing house is to be revised in a gender-sensitive language.
All 12,000 personal and job titles should be changed in such a way that in future there will be two instead of one word article - one for the male and one for the female form, reported the newspaper “Die Welt” on Thursday in Berlin.
For example, “doctor” and “doctor” are already listed there, each with its own contribution.
In the online
dictionary
, tenants or schoolchildren are now also referred to as “noun, masculine”, for example.
A tenant is therefore no longer “someone who has rented something”, but a “male person who has rented something”.
A tenant is declared accordingly.
Duden is gendered: criticism from linguistic research
A student is defined as a “boy, adolescent who goes to school”.
This means that the so-called
generic masculine used
in personal designations will in
fact disappear
from the duden.de website.
A
“generic masculine”
is a word that has a gender-neutral meaning and applies to men and women alike.
The revision of the online Duden should be completed this year, the publisher said according to the “Welt” report.
The
Duden
publishing house stated: "The male forms were never gender-neutral, we only specify the meanings as part of the ongoing editorial work on our content."
Several linguists criticized the new word entries.
The Potsdam linguist Peter Eisenberg describes it in the “Welt” as “misleading the reader”.
The words are all specifically masculine as well as generic, i.e. gender-neutral.
They would also be needed that way by the language community.
+
Language researchers criticize the plan to gender the Duden.
(Archive photo)
© Sebastian Gollnow / dpa
The Munich linguist Elisabeth Leiss said it was grotesque and absolutely irresponsible to claim that words such as schoolchildren, doctor or tenant had no gender-abstracting meaning.
The
Duden
editorial team was apparently completely addicted to the “current gender nonsense”.
(tu / epd)