Sibylle Sauerwein

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. mehr