The gendered language (r)evolution: Introduction to the special topic

Gender is a construct in constant evolution.Socio-cultural gender norms, gender stereo types, as well as the way gender is perceived, interpreted, and conceptualized by people, are constantly changing.At the same time, the way we talk about gender, both as a whole and about specific genders mimics these societal changes.Existing language is shifting to include women and gender minorities in roles that were previously reserved for men: take, for example, the case of gendered languages developing feminine forms for job titles that were previously only masculine, such as the word ministro (Italian translation of "secretary of State", masculine) acquiring the form ministra (feminine).These feminine forms are more common in more egalitarian countries (Hodel et al., 2017), suggesting that gender and language go hand in hand.At the same time, new linguistic neutralization strategies are being developed to describe previously invisible and unrecognized identities, such as non-binary individuals, who are often confronted not only with highly gendered societies, but also highly gendered languages.One exam ple of this is instances of gender-neutral neo-pronouns making up for binary language forms, such as the English ze or the Swedish hen (e.g., Renstrm et al., 2024), which were shown to reduce the androcentric bias more than traditional neutral words (e.g., singular they; Lindqvist et al., 2019).Another example is the utilization of written neutralization forms such as the "gender star" (i.e., -*), which has been shown to elicit inclusive gender