Gender-inclusive strategies in Italian: stereotypes and attitudes

Italian is an inflectional language with an overt expression of a morphological gender marking. Although assigning the grammatical gender is arbitrary for inanimate nouns, for animated nouns the correspondence between grammatical gender and inherent gender is not always realised, as Italian language tends to use the masculine form with presumed universal value. Therefore, different possibilities have been proposed to make the language more inclusive. The two most used strategies appear to be i) the feminization with reduplication (e.g. cari tutti e care tutte, ‘dear all’, with both feminine and masculine forms) and ii) the neutralisation of the morpheme that conveys the grammatical gender information (e.g., car* tutt*, ‘dear all’, cf. Sabatini 1987; Robustelli 2012; Cavagnoli 2013; Marotta & Monaco 2016; Gheno 2019; Maturi 2020; Manera 2021) The Italian debate for a gender inclusive language appears to be very active. The political value of linguistic strategies such as neutralisation suggests that these proposals are likely to be welcomed by people with progressive political views; contrarily, the same strategies may be opposed by people with standard language ideologies, as well as those who identify with different feminist views (such as second wave feminism). However, research carried out so far in Italy has been focused on how these strategies are mostly used, whereas very little work has been done to understand how people react to the use of inclusive language (Comandini 2021). This proposal aims at filling this gap by studying the attitudes of the Italian linguistic community towards inclusive language, as well as the stereotypes associated with people using specific strategies. The research also investigates whether there is a correlation between attitudes towards inclusive strategies and linguistic sexism as a whole. Finally, it attempts to confirm whether age or any personal involvement in feminist issues may play a role in determining attitudes. For investigating stereotypes regarding the use of gender inclusive language, the Stereotype Content Model was adopted (SCM, Fiske, Cuddy, Glick & Xu 2002 and others): according to this model, people judge social groups along two axes, namely competence and warmth. For this study, the hypothesis to be tested is that different strategies (reduplication with the feminine form and neutralization) are associated with different stereotypes along the two dimensions of competence and warmth. For investigating linguistic sexism, the Italian adaptation of the IASNL - Inventory of Attitudes toward Sexist/Non sexist Language was used in its short version of 21 questions (IASNL – General, IASNL-G, (Parks & Roberton 2000, Maass & Merkel 2013). A questionnaire was designed and administered online. In the first part of the questionnaire, people were asked to evaluate the hypothetical writer of different texts containing one of the two most commons strategies (4 texts with reduplication and 4 texts with neutralization). People were asked to judge on a 5-point Likert scale the dimensions of competence and warmth of the hypothetical writer; they then had to guess the gender of the writers and to rate the acceptability of the text. In the second part, the 21 questions of the IASNL- G were administered. Finally, information about age, educational qualification, gender, and interest in feminist issues of the respondents were collected. Statistical analysis show that different strategies activate different stereotypes; it appears also that respondents show neutral or slightly positive attitudes for an inclusive language. However, there is a correlation between attitudes and the IASNL-G score, with people reporting positive attitudes towards non-sexist language judging neutralization strategies as warmer. Finally, younger people, regardless of their IASNL score, appear to be more positive toward gender inclusive strategies, whereas for older respondents only those who obtain a high IASNL score tend to evaluate those who use gender inclusive language as being more competent. Overall, research shows a change in progress toward gender inclusive language, although other factors seem to play a role in determining attitudes.