Abstract:

The present study investigates the acceptance of diverse person denotations in legal language. Several groups of recipients were tested with an original official text: 1. law professionals (N = 49), 2. people of age 60+ years (N = 46) and 3. people without academic educational degrees (N = 53). In an online study participants were presented with a cloze task. They were asked to fill in the gaps by selecting person denotations from a list of alternatives provided in pull down menues. These alternatives were generic masculine forms (e. g. der Wähler, i. e. the voter), gender neutral forms (e. g. die Wahlberechtigten, i. e. persons entitled to vote) and forms that comprised both masculine and feminine (e. g. der Wähler bzw. die Wählerin, i. e. the male or female voter). Afterwards, participants rated the text they had created for comprehensibility and gender-fairness. Results suggest a wide acceptance of gender-neutral role nouns across all samples. These forms also meet the criteria of comprehensibility and gender-fairness for official language. Options for creative, that is flexible and context dependent use of diverse denotations are discussed based on the present findings.