As part of a global movement for greater gender parity via language, the Danish Language's governing body is working to include more neutral terms for each gender in the upcoming edition of its official dictionary.
Revision of 'Retskrivningsordbogen'
Danish media sites report that in 2024, the official Danish spelling dictionary, the Retskrivningsordbogen, will be updated to make its language more gender-neutral and combat gender stereotypes.
Researchers at the Danish Language Council, an organization under the Danish Ministry of Culture, have sifted through its over a thousand pages to find male terms with no feminine counterpart or work to revise outdated meanings. According to the Danish news outlet DR, they have recommended adding the phrase "career man" to the Danish language to complement the current term "career woman."
For instance, the term "finansmand" (financier) is one of several Danish nouns ending in -mand, or "man," however, it may be rendered as "finanskvinde" (female financier). The plan calls for more gender-neutral word definitions, including eliminating the usage of male pronouns like the mentioned example.
Senior researcher at the council and dictionary editor Margrethe Heidemann Andersen said the initiative has garnered more attention in Denmark than the council's usual rule revisions in that control items like commas. She pointed out that the issues involving identity and gender evoked the strongest reactions.
One of the three editors for the new edition is Heidemann Andersen. She told DR that they went through the whole Retskrivningsordbogen, looking up every instance of the terms "woman," "person," and "man" that ended in those Danish letters. They tallied up the frequency with which each term appears in conversation. Sometimes, they even suggested using the female forms of the terms.
They also suggested using gender-neutral terms and revising definitions that rely too much on stereotypically female or male pronouns.
In DR's interview with Heidemann Andersen, this meticulous procedure was carried out to consider linguistic change. However, "there are some people who have grown up with a language who think we are changing too much, and do not think we need a word like female financier," she explained.
Cultural Disagreements
According to The Washington Post, the question of whether and how languages with grammatical genders may be adapted to societal developments has been a source of contention for many cultures in recent years.
The gender-neutral pronoun 'hen' was officially introduced to the Swedish vocabulary in 2015. In recent years, certain German towns and government entities have required gender-neutral wording in official papers.
However, equality plans have been met with resistance in certain other locations.
In 2021, the Académie Française, the French organization in charge of linguistic standards, said that the gender-neutral variety of French known as "inclusive writing" was detrimental to the use and comprehension of French.
Meanwhile, some Hispanics in the US have fought back against initiatives to use "x" after nouns in place of the masculine "o" or feminine "a."
