TRI NURANIWATI (UNIVERSITAS GADJAH MADA)
GENDER-INCLUSIVE LANGUAGE IN JOURNAL ARTICLES: A CORPUS-BASED STUDY : LINGUISTICS, DISCOURSE ANALYSIS, AND RELATED AREAS
Commenced in 2015 by the United Nations (UN), Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is a joint blueprint for peace efforts and the prosperity of humankind now and in the future. Agreed by all members of the UN, the seventeen goals of SDGs are actively promoted and advanced by various fields including education. Academia and researchers are encouraged to actively engage in achieving the goals. Goal number five of the SDGs is promoting gender equality which could be attained, among others, by promoting the use of gender-inclusive language in both spoken and written publications. The UN provides gender-inclusive recommendations on the use of pronouns, suffixes, working titles, gender-neutral words, and social titles to achieve gender balance in publications, including those related to academic discourse. The study aims to explore and evaluate the use of gender-inclusive language in a corpus of 261,430 tokens collected from 38 journal articles. The texts for the corpus are derived from research articles and brief reports from the Spring 2024 and Winter 2023 editions of the Journal of AsiaTEFL. The corpus data are analyzed using #LancsBox X corpus tool (Brezina & Platt, 2024) for frequency and concordance information. The results show the dominant use of neutral pronouns ‘their’ (freq: 1389) and ‘they’ (freq: 657). Pronouns ‘he’ and ‘she’ and their derivatives are only particularly used in reference to a specific person and mostly appear in examples. Furthermore, gender-neutral words such as ‘person’ and ‘people’ are employed instead of gender-specific ‘man/men’ and ‘woman/women.’ The discussion showcases the journal's commitment to gender-inclusive language utilization in its publication.
Tri Nuraniwati teaches at Bachelor of Applied English Program, Vocational College, Universitas Gadjah Mada, Indonesia. Her research interest is in corpus linguistics.