The University of Cambridge in England is reportedly teaching students in a German class to adopt new gender-neutral versions of plural nouns in a bid to be more inclusive.
The university acknowledged that using exclusively gender-neutral words will be “difficult to achieve,” and said that the structure of the language “can inhibit inclusivity,” the Times reported. The vast majority of German nouns that refer to people do so either with a male or female inclination.
“Gender as a grammatical category is part of native speakers’ language competence, and overlaps only partly with gender as a real-world phenomenon and a lived identity,” the university’s program says.
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In a statement to the Washington Examiner, a spokesperson for the UK-based university said that “as it clearly states on the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics website, ‘students are free to choose for themselves how to engage with inclusive language when speaking and writing in German. To suggest otherwise is entirely wrong.”
The university’s attempt to neutralize gender in the German language drew criticism from several language experts. The German Language Association’s Oliver Baer told the Times that Cambridge’s efforts reminded him of Monty Python.
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“It’s a minefield and I would hate to recommend to any Englishman to have to go through the details of all that. Although it’s accepted, it’s not respected to speak like that in Germany,” Baer said. “If a non-native speaker came and tried to use gender-neutral German while on holiday here I think they would stand a good chance of making a fool of themselves. Fortunately, we have no German word for ‘woke’ so we borrow it from the English.”
Efforts to neutralize gendered terms in language are not limited to German. Progressive activists have drawn criticism for repeatedly using the term “Latinx” instead of “Latino” or “Latina” to refer to Latin Americans, and polling indicates that only a small percentage of Hispanic Americans approve of the term.
