Research on gender and language is tightly knitted to social debates on gender equality and non-discriminatory language use. Psycholinguistic scholars have made significant contributions in this field. However, corpus-based studies that investigate these matters within the context of language use are still rare. In our study, we address the question of how much textual material would actually have to be changed if non-gender-inclusive texts were rewritten to be gender-inclusive. This quantitative measure is an important empirical insight, as a recurring argument against the use of gender-inclusive German is that it supposedly makes written texts too long and complicated. It is also argued that gender-inclusive language has negative effects on language learners. However, such effects are only likely if gender-inclusive texts are very different from those that are not gender-inclusive. In our corpus-linguistic study, we manually annotated German press texts to identify the parts that would have to be changed. Our results show that, on average, less than 1% of all tokens would be affected by gender-inclusive language. This small proportion calls into question whether gender-inclusive German presents a substantial barrier to understanding and learning the language, particularly when we take into account the potential complexities of interpreting masculine generics.

翻译：性别与语言研究与社会上关于性别平等和非歧视性语言使用的辩论紧密相连。心理语言学学者在该领域做出了重要贡献，然而，在语言使用背景下基于语料库研究这些问题的成果仍然稀缺。本研究探讨了一个关键问题：若将非性别包容文本改写为性别包容文本，实际需要修改多少文本材料？这一量化指标提供了重要的实证洞见，因为反对使用性别包容德语的常见论点认为，这会使书面文本变得冗长复杂，且对语言学习者产生负面影响。然而，此类影响仅当性别包容文本与非性别包容文本存在显著差异时才有可能显现。通过语料库语言学方法，我们手动标注德语新闻文本以识别需要修改的部分。结果显示，平均仅有不足1%的词汇会受性别包容语言影响。这一极小比例质疑了性别包容德语是否构成理解与学习语言的重大障碍，尤其是考虑到解读男性通用形式可能存在的潜在复杂性时。