Open Access

Samira Ochs, Jan Oliver Rüdiger

• New gender-inclusive orthographies such as the asterisk or the colon arewidely debated in various German public spheres, including areas of academia. However, little is known about the frequency and distribution of these neographies. This study presents a microdiachronic analysis of binary (i.e., including onlymen and women) and non-binary (i.e., inclusive of all genders) variants of gender-inclusive orthographies from 2015 to 2023. Using the German Reference Corpus(DeReKo), we assembled a subcorpus of press texts from 15 sources, comprisingapproximately 1.2 billion tokens. Our corpus-driven approach reveals that the nonbinary variants asterisk (Schüler*innen‘pupils’) and colon (Schüler:innen) havebecomedominant after the 2019 change of the German civil status law to encompass a third positive gender option, divers. Binary forms, especially the capitalI(as inSchülerInnen), have been in decline since. The non-binary forms are un-evenly distributed across sources and lexemes, a pattern further explored througha lexicon-based search. We examined 131 pre-selected personal nouns with systematic gender differentiation to compare binary and non-binary variants to regularmasculine and feminine forms. The results show that masculine forms remaindominant, followed by feminine forms, with both maintaining stable frequenciesover time. In contrast, binary and non-binary forms remain marginal. These quantitative baselines enhance the linguistic understanding of how sources, lexemes, and extralinguistic events shape the use of gender-inclusive language. Our studythus offers a foundation for more objective discussions on the subject.