The gender asterisk in German: the sensorial impact of linguistic change

Description

Changes to orthography are bound to meet strong resistance by the linguistic community. Examples of this can be found in the reactions to the orthographic reform of the German language in the late 90s or the more recent debate around the orthographic agreement for Portuguese as pluricentric language. The negative opinions about these two processes were supported by argumentation concerning the double principles of phonology and etymology guiding the changes. Some of the criticism to the orthographic reform in Germany 25 years ago focused on the visual form of the words in new writing. Puzzlement was caused at the triple “f” in words like “Schifffahrt”, and in the new “Kuss”, with double “s” instead of the original “ß”, one could no longer recognize the shape of two people about to kiss, an image lost to the orthographic change.
A similar situation has been recently introduced by the gender asterisk in German, aiming at more gender justice in language. The discussion revolving around this phenomenon goes beyond the visual impact of this element dividing a word. The asterisk is actually an indicator in writing of a forced break that is produced in speech, when speakers say a word like “Student*innen”. The morphological separation between the stem word and the suffix is normally not marked: neither in the pronunciation nor in spelling of the word (for example, Leh|re|rin, not Lehr|er|in). Syllables, not morphemes, are pronunciation units. What the asterisk does is to invert this: suddenly, the gender morpheme in the plural is highlighted in speaking, a change that strikes as unnatural.
German is a language prone to brief pauses, which the language so charmingly names Knacklaut (the glottal stop, referred to as the “crackling sound”), but these pauses follow a phonological principle and are not marked in writing with a specific sign. The asterisk however is bringing about a pause that even for German speakers sounds too unexpected and long. This sound resistance reinforces the visual resistance to the asterisk, brought about by the implied interpretation that this divisive sign is there to eliminate something unpleasant or unreferenceable (a curse or swearword), as conventionalized in cartoons or graphic novels. Visual resistance meets sound resistance in the criticism of this way to do justice to gender in language.
In this paper we propose a look into the resistance towards the gender asterisk and we intend to explain it, firstly, from a linguistic angle, in view of morphological regularities, but also bearing in mind other strands of research such as sound symbolism and what the break introduced by the asterisk might imply. We then seek to relate this analysis with the argumentation used against the asterisk to see whether this is founded and sustained by language studies.

Period	10 Dec 2021
Event title	Between Feminine and Masculine - Language(s) and Society
Event type	Conference
Organiser	Research Centre for Communication and Culture (CECC)
Location	Lisboa, PortugalShow on map