Challenges of adopting gender–inclusive language in Slovene

Abstract

Th is paper presents the challenges of introducing gender–inclusive language in Slovene in last two decades. Within this scope we focus on the progressive developments in the sphere of adopting gender–inclusive language and present the entire background as well as the counter–forces (and their line of argumentation), working to eradicate the eff orts for employing gender–inclusive language in the Slovenian society. We thus present the main tendencies as well as linguistic elements aiming to facilitate gender–inclusive language in the Slovenian society, focusing mainly on the use of the underscore within our analysis. We analyze two manually constructed corpora with texts harvested from Slovenian websites of the organizations that use the underscore in order to employ gender– inclusive language. We show that the use of the underscore is continually growing, in spite of the eff orts to downplay its value by challenging its usability and ubiquity.