The public broadcasters say they phrased “non-discriminatory”. But that is exactly the question.
Image: picture alliance / picture agency online/Ohde
Around 350 linguists and literary scholars have signed an appeal criticizing gender language in public broadcasting. We are still waiting for a substantive statement from the institutions. A guest post.
Dhe social acceptance of public service broadcasting has declined in recent years. The ÖRR is in a crisis of confidence. Keywords of this crisis are: nepotism, felt, lack of transparency, bloated structures, lavish salaries, attitude and trend journalism. And as if all of these factors weren’t enough, around two years ago, as agreed, the use of so-called gender-appropriate language spread across all channels. With “supervised speaking” (Joachim Gauck), the broadcasters are driving another wedge between themselves and the media consumers. Criticism of their instructive, ideologically motivated language practice let ARD and ZDF just as defiantly as self-righteously roll off. One sees oneself on the side of moral progress and presents oneself as an avant-garde of linguistic renewal, falsely declared as “language change”.
We, a group of linguists and literary scholars, found out about the language-political zeal of the broadcasters when we issued an appeal at the end of July this year to criticize the ÖRR’s gender practice (www.linguistik-vs-gender.de). The list of signatories to the document now (as of December 2022) includes around 350 linguists and literary scholars. Among these were a number of experts in the field such as Peter Eisenberg, Gisela Zifonun, Manfred Krifka and Heide Wegener. What is this call about? The broadcasters are asked to deal with linguistically based criticism of the concept of the controversial “gender-fair” language. The signatories point out that a generalized assessment of the generic masculine as a discriminatory form of language cannot be justified on a scientific basis. At its core, gender is based on an inadmissible mixture of the categories gender (grammatical gender) and sexus (natural gender).
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