Who makes language rules: Rulebooks or the people who use the language? When it comes to gendered language rules, people seem the likely culprit.
The editing community’s version of the chicken-or-egg debate is straightforward: Do people define language rules first or do style guides? Though there’s no simple answer to this question, a recent analysis on gendered language use offers important insights on the age-old debate.
During Brooke James’s (Editing & Publishing ’22) senior year at BYU, she paired with Associate Professor Jacob Rawlins (Editing, the History of Publishing) to study how five common gendered nouns were used over an 11-year period. Now an editor at the Oxford University Press, James is preparing to present their research at the Linguistic Intersections of Language and Gender Conference hosted in Germany in August 2025. Their findings build off existing research, showing that gender-fair language has a positive impact on society; likewise, its use in the news suggests that writers have been guiding style guides, not the other way around.
Guidance Over the Years
Online news pieces require more technical writing than creative, making them an ideal source to study formal writing norms. For James and Rawlins’s research, understanding gendered-language usage from 2011 to 2022 required studying two separate sources: the widely accepted AP Stylebook and language usage in news media. “We were looking at not just gendered language in general, but gendered terms that have been policed and prescribed before,” James says.
To accomplish this goal, they specifically looked at how usage shifted over time for five gender-specific title roots that could be joined with woman, man, or person: spokes-, chair-, congress-, business-, and council-. AP style guides from 2011 to 2016 instruct writers to avoid using the ‘person’ form of gendered words; the 2017–2019 editions, on the other hand, instead call the neutral form “acceptable.” It wasn’t until 2022, however, that the AP Stylebook began instructing writers to use neutral word forms when possible.
The researchers’ analysis of articles from the mid-2010s until 2021, however, tells a different story about these nouns in action. Using the News on the Web (NOW) corpus—a collection of news pieces available for analysis—they noted an increase in gender-neutral language despite the style guides’ explicit preference for the ‘-woman’ or ‘-man’ forms. “For the most part, news writers were making the change to gender-neutral first, before it was accepted into the stylebooks,” says Rawlins. “So, people were driving the change, and then the stylebook would accept it.” According to both researchers, this finding has exciting implications in the field of linguistics—and in the world beyond it.
Language Change Brings Societal Change
The steady increase of neutral word forms contributes to the increase of something academics refer to as gender-fair language: “The answer to inclusive language isn’t always to make it neutral; it’s to make it fair and relevant to the context,” James says. “The brain absorbs so much from language that we don’t realize, which is why it’s important to promote more gender-fair language.” In many scenarios, this means adopting a neutral word form instead of the traditional masculine forms. However, fair language also refers to thoughtfully choosing gender-specific roots to describe women, men, and non-binary individuals as applicable.
James and Rawlins believe that intentionally adopting gender-fair language practices will have large impacts on generations to come. “One of the reasons why we study this is because if, in elementary school, kids just read about firemen, a little girl may unconsciously internalize that it’s a male profession,” even if she understands it can technically apply to anyone, Rawlins explains. He hopes that an increase in both spoken and written gender-fair language can help limit stereotypes found in words such as fireman or cameraman.
Though such small changes may seem insignificant, this type of language usage holds a lot of power and offers hope for those who use it: “As we develop a more gender-fair language that responds to context, that is dynamic, and that is inclusive, what we have is a language that empowers and influences people for good,” Rawlins concludes. “And it lifts everybody.”
Read their paper published in English Today here.