Aptum, Zeitschrift für Sprachkritik und Sprachkultur 21. Jahrgang. 2025, Heft 1

In applied linguistics, various studies have already been written on the inclusion, discrimination, and exclusion of minorities and marginalized collectives in language use. However, a theoretical introduction of the linguistics of diversity and inclusion (LDI) as an independent linguistic discipline has yet to emerge. This paper aims to close this research desideratum and present a preliminary theory of the linguistics of diversity and inclusion, essential for the classification of research concerning the communicative patterns of diversity, inclusion, discrimination, and exclusion. In addition to the linguistic study of diversity and inclusion, LDI also includes patterns of discrimination and inclusion, but focuses on diversity and inclusion, even if discrimination and exclusion must not be ignored when examining inclusion for a scientifically precise overview. More specifically, this paper will first introduce the theory, research goals and the object of the linguistics of diversity and inclusion, second, describe the opportunities for the applied linguistics, third explain, how LDI can be applied for the study of language use for observing communicative patterns of inclusion, diversity, discrimination, and exclusion, fourth discuss, how the discipline of LDI can be combined with methods of corpus linguistics for revealing the communicative realization of inclusion.

Today more than ever, the understanding and perception of inclusion is central when we deal with current socio-political discourses. It is therefore essential to clarify which terms we use in this context and how we use them. In a first analytical approach, a selection of digital lexicographical resources was therefore analysed in order to identify the different readings of the term. In a second step, the technical language reading was then checked and supplemented using subject-related corpus linguistic analyses based on the legal text of the Federal Participation Act. The aim is not only to analyse the technical language and content, which contributes to the clarification of the intended objectives of the Federal Participation Act, but also to contribute to the definition of the discipline of the linguistics of diversity and inclusion.

This article examines the linguistic change in the denomination of persons with disability using a contrastive analysis of a Twitter corpus from 2009 to 2023 on the hashtags #disability and #inclusion in German and French. The study at the intersection of the linguistics of diversity and inclusion, digital lexicology, and human-centered data science shows how prepositional constructions (mit ‘with’ in German and en ‘in’ in French) develop in both languages according to the inclusive Anglo-American People-First Language system, which first name the supergroup of all persons and specify them in postpositions through the prepositional construction mit Behinderung (‘with disability’) and en situation de handicap (‘in the situation of disability’). This study discusses this finding and, in addition to linguistics, is also aligned with the research tradition of human-centered data science, which uses data from social media to gain socially relevant insights into inclusive formulations in a scientific process.

This study examines how discourses on disability sports are constructed on Instagram, focusing on hashtags #handisport and #behindertensport. It analyzes 100 French and German posts from 2022 to 2024 to identify language- and culture-specific features. The study aims to understand if and how digital media contribute to inclusion, considering the communicative routines of social media. Instagram was chosen for its combination of audiovisual content and microblogging, making it particularly relevant for showcasing social phenomena. This exploratory corpus study examines three linguistic levels and their specific features related to digitalization (use of hashtags, private-public interactions and multimodal representation). The contrastive perspective reveals potential trends in linguistic construction and in the evaluation of disability.

In this study, the community of practice assembling under the Twitter/X hashtag #depression is examined for its practices of inclusion by applying computer-based methods and focusing on digital resources. For this purpose, a Twitter/X corpus was generated on the hashtag #depression, which was then annotated with regard to the social support of the users among each other. The users' narratives, which contain expressions of self, and which elicit reactions from the community, such as the expression of sympathy or the exchange of information, play a special role. Additionally, the fact that users mutually address the closeness and social support of the community among each other points to a highly inclusive behaviour. Thus, the evidence of cultural evolution in relation to people with depression and their inclusive behaviour in social networks is made visible.

This study examines how queer relationships are linguistically constructed and marked through "Othering" in the transcripts of the parliamentary debates in the German Bundestag from 1949 to 2024, using a mixed-methods approach combining quantitative corpus linguistics and qualitative discourse analysis. The study identifies persistent linguistic strategies that marginalize queer relationships as "deviant" or "different", while also observing shifts in discourse towards greater inclusivity. The findings indicate that early debates predominantly framed queerness in terms of criminalization and pathology, whereas later discussions incorporated more implicit forms of Othering. The study highlights the role of language in shaping societal perceptions of queer relationships and argues for the importance of linguistic inclusivity in political discourse.

The consideration of group-internal linguistic perspectives is an essential aspect of the Linguistics of Diversity and Inclusion. In the field of queer linguistics, this has so far mostly been done at the micro level, for example in the context of so-called small stories and other qualitative approaches, or smaller peer group corpora. Research on external perspectives is more common, e.g. on discourses in mainstream media or in political discussions about (a part of) the queer community. In German-speaking contexts, linguistic research on queer topics in general is still in its early stages, and corpus-based approaches to researching internal perspectives in particular are still rare. In our article, we present a new corpus resource that enables comprehensive corpusbased research on queer topics in German: the Queere Korpus (QK). The corpus is designed to comprise a balanced amount of various text types from three different German-speaking countries: Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. So far, it contains 55,916,108 tokens distributed across a total of 28 gay, lesbian, queer and non-binary/trans* sources. We included online magazines, websites and blogs, and (digitized) print magazines. In our paper, we describe the corpus compilation and structure in detail and outline possible research questions and goals, exemplified by an analysis of the corpus stratification regarding the topic “Ehe für Alle” (same-sex marriage). While the corpus is not yet publicly available, we provide an extensive dataset of frequency lists, co-occurrences and N-grams together with this article.