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Rewriting Language – How Literary Texts Can Promote Inclusive Language Use

Christiane Luck

REWRITING LANGUAGE – HOW LITERARY TEXTS CAN PROMOTE INCLUSIVE LANGUAGE USE

Conclusions

Despite decades of research and empirical support, inclusive language use is far from the norm in the English and German languages. While some progress has been made – many official guidelines today recommend inclusive terminology – changes remain contested, and many English and German speakers continue to employ male generic terms.

As studies by Kuhn and Gabriel (2014) and Sczesny et al. (2015) showed, only a minority of speakers use inclusive terms spontaneously. However, the authors also found that raising awareness of the importance of inclusive language can make a tangible difference.

 After encountering texts that aim to sensitise readers, usage generally improved. This was the starting point for my proposal: I suggested literary texts can sensitise readers to the impact of biased language and thereby promote inclusive language use.

To explore the validity of my proposal I employed an interdisciplinary approach: in the first part of this book I evaluated the effectiveness of literary texts thematising sex/gender and language from a linguistic and philosophical perspective; in the second, I conducted a focus group study to gauge their ability to raise awareness of the importance of inclusive language.

My premise was based on the findings of narrative research. As Green and Brock (2000) found, through the process of transportation readers accept narrative characters and events as ‘real’. Moreover, depending on the level of transportation, readers adjust their beliefs in line with the fictional perspective.

As Hoeken and Fikkers’s research (2014) showed, this adjustment takes place even when readers hold different views from the ones presented in the narrative.

 That is, transportation encourages readers to tap into feelings of identification and empathy, and restrain critical faculties.

The desire of readers to engage with a narrative, therefore, allows literary texts to ‘get under the radar’, as Dal Cin et al. (2004) term it, of certain preconceptions. This ability, I hypothesised, makes literary texts a useful tool for sensitising readers.