Was fördert, was behindert geschlechtsneutrales Deutsch?

In the organizer's words:

On the eve of the annual conference, FemNetzCon, we cordially invite you to a public lecture and discussion!

The lecture with the title "What promotes, what hinders gender-neutral German? Review and classification after half a century of language development." will be given by linguist Bärbel Miemietz. The discussion will be moderated by Maja Linthe.

Please register in advance on the Wikimedia Deutschland event page.

About the content of the lecture

Language development is a slow process, especially when it comes to grammar, which is powerfully resistant to change. Changes usually happen unnoticed and above all from within. But even grammar is subject to external influences. In her lecture, linguist Bärbel Miemietz expands the often emotionally charged topic of "gendering" to include perspectives that have received little attention and encourages a more objective discussion. For example, what effect did two directives issued by the Council of the European Community 50 years ago have? Why did the publication of the "Guidelines for avoiding sexist language use" by a group of feminist linguists in 1980 lead to unusually heated debates in linguistics? And how can a move away from the binary gender model be implemented in a linguistically, i.e. grammatically, correct way?

The free encyclopaedia Wikipedia voluntarily binds itself to the official rules of the German Spelling Council in the German language version - what this means for a language that is supposed to "co-mean" everyone equally will be discussed after the lecture.

About the speakers

The lecture will be given by Wikipedian and linguist Bärbel Miemietz. She was active as a university equal opportunities officer for twenty years. Before that, she taught Slavic linguistics, with a feminist view of language systems and language use from an early stage. The discussion will be moderated by long-time Wikipedian and linguist Maja Linthe. She spent several years researching and teaching at the University of Mannheim on the composition of texts in social media and Wikipedia. She has also created Wikipedia articles in several projects with students.