Abstract This paper investigates the use of gender-inclusive language on 42 municipal websites from Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and South Tyrol between 2022 and 2024. Based on a corpus of two key subpages of each city, namely those that provide information on how change one’s address and online job postings, the study shows that the choice of personal nouns is shaped by both regional and text-specific factors. Administrative texts tend to favor gender-neutral forms such as epicene nouns (e. g. Person, Mensch ). In contrast, job advertisements which are shaped by legal frameworks and have persuasive intent, show a strong preference for explicit gender-inclusive forms, in particular those using non-binary gender symbols such as the asterisk ( Krankenpfleger*innen ) or the colon ( Sachbearbeiter:in ). Regional variation is most evident on pages providing administrative information: Austrian and South Tyrolean cities are more likely to use gender symbols than German or Swiss cities. In Germany, generic masculine forms are the second most common choice after gender-neutral forms, whereas binary pair forms are most prevalent in Switzerland. Despite this variation, patterns of language use have remained relatively stable over the three years analysed. These findings indicate that the flexible, context- and genre-sensitive use of person references is already widespread in public communication within the pluricentric German-speaking area.
Ochs et al. (Mon,) studied this question.