Open Access

Carolin Müller-Spitzer, Samira Ochs, Jan Oliver Rüdiger, Sascha Wolfer

• The Christmas and New Year addresses of the Federal Presidents and Federal Chancellors have been an annually recurring political text formal since 1949. This makes it wellsuited for shortterm diachronic corpus analyses. In our contribution, we focus on the use of personal nouns with a special emphasis on gender-inclusive language. Using manual annotations, we show that 11 % of all tokens in the speeches refer to persons, not including proper names. Pronouns make up 69 % of person references, personal nouns 31 %. In the case ofpersonal nouns, we see that gender-neutral nouns or neutralisations predominate (58 %), followed by masculine generics (20 %). An important research question for this article is whether the use of gender-inclusive variants in language has increased over time. We can seefrom the data that this is the case: the use of masculine generics has been declining since 1995,while pair forms have been increasing from the beginning. This is especially true for explicit pair forms like Mitbürgerinnen und Mitbürger ('fellow citizens'). Gender-inclusive language has therefore long been a part of the addresses, especially in the form of neutralisations and pair forms.