Ideologies of English, ideologies of gender: enregisterment of internal and external purism in German language ideologies

Abstract This paper seeks to explore the structural, systematic and continued enregisterment of ideologies of English and ideologies of Gendern , constructed as socially salient registers associated with characterological figures in German and German-speaking discourse. Linguistic purism is a longstanding, pervasive and well-documented sentiment in the logic of German-speaking language ideology. In most accounts, emphasis is placed on linguistic purism as a nationalist gesture. In particular, English has been the target of external purism since the 19th century through popular and political discourse and aided along by ideology brokers such as the Verein Deutsche Sprache. Less attention has been paid to German language ideologies that are aimed at variation within the language. We wish to propose in this paper that the notion of internal purism can constructively be used to understand, describe and analyze language-ideological animus against gender-inclusive language. This study is grounded in corpus-based discourse analysis to bring forth these parallels and entanglements in the enregisterment of internal and external purism as two dominant attitudinal strands in the German-speaking ideological landscape. The digitized text of the magazine Sprachnachrichten , published continually since 2002 by the Verein Deutsche Sprache, has been used as a corpus for frequency analyses and qualitative discourse analysis. Additionally, journalistic and social media discourse surrounding policies of gender-inclusive language and the ongoing antifeminist rollback of such initiatives have been considered. Based on this data, our analysis constructs a timeline of shifting and overlapping waves of external versus internal purism and identifies intersections of ideological discourse aimed at anti-English and anti-gender ideological discourse.