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

Changes to orthography are bound to meet strong resistance by language users. Examples of this are reactions to the orthographic reform of the German language in the late 90s (Heller, 1996) or the debate around an orthographic agreement for Portuguese as pluricentric language (Correia, n.d.). Negative opinions about these two processes are often supported by argumentation concerning the apparent contradiction of having principles of phonology and etymology guiding the changes. A similar situation has recently been introduced by the gender asterisk in German, an orthographic change seeking more gender justice in language. The asterisk in writing has led to a sensorially disruptive change in how words are pronounced, namely through the introduction of a glottal stop in a sound context that normally does not foresee it, as a way to mark in speaking what the asterisk does in writing: to highlight the difference between the gender-inclusive form and the representation of the feminine in a binary morphological marking: e.g. Student*innen vs. Studentinnen. This paper proposes to investigate the resistance to the gender asterisk and to explain it from a linguistic perspective, namely with consideration of the morphological rules of the language. It further seeks to relate this analysis to the argumentation used against the asterisk to see whether this is sustained by language studies.