Spatial and temporal trends in the use of gender inclusive language: a study of Spanish-language Twitter and news media

Abstract Gender inclusive language has been the subject of public and scientific discourse for many years in the Spanish-speaking world. In this article, we study two ways in which gender inclusive language has appeared in the public discourse: first, we create and investigate a dataset of how often inclusive language is being discussed in news media and second, we create and investigate a Twitter (now X) corpus of tweets containing certain gender inclusive words. Our investigations focus on how these data have changed over time and how they vary by country. We find that over time, the use of the gender inclusive endings “-x” and “-e” has increased overall and that the “-e” ending increases in relative frequency as one heads farther south. In contrast, we find that the word “Latinx” rarely appears in Spanish tweets, and the word “Latine” appears even less. We also find that, collectively, the number of mentions of “inclusive language” in newspapers increases over time. Interestingly, though, we find that in the last year of our data, while there was a marked increase in the use of the phrase “lenguaje inclusivo” in news media, there was a drop in the use of particular words from our Twitter corpus ending in “-x” and “-e.”