The Acceptability of Feminine Job Titles in Italian Newspaper Articles
A Survey Involving Italian Native Speakers
abstract
This paper describes a procedure to assess the acceptability of gender-inclusive linguistic structures. Informants were asked to provide an overall linguistic assessment of extracts from newspaper articles while unaware of the final objective of the survey, i.e. eliciting their opinions on the masculine and feminine forms of professions and titles. Although opinions varied, the results show an increase in the acceptability of feminine forms, probably strengthened by their frequent use in the media. Furthermore, those forms provide a solution to the morphological and syntactic inconsistencies considered by the informants as a violation of Italian grammar rules.
Keywords: Italian Morphology • Italian Language and Linguistics • Gender-Inclusive Language • Italian Sociolinguistics • Feminine Job Titles • Survey Methods