Gender-inclusive language in university communication: a contrastive analysis of gender-inclusive guidelines in German, Italian, and English

This article offers a contrastive examination of gender-inclusive language guidelines issued by universities in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, and the United Kingdom. Drawing on a corpus of 287 institutional documents – 122 in German, 34 in Italian, and 133 in English – the study identifies and quantifies specification and neutralization strategies recommended for ad-ministrative and pedagogical discourse. After manual annotation, strategies were coded into a database, enabling statistical comparison across languages and nations. Results show that Ger-man-speaking institutions favor gender-marked neographies and pair forms, whereas Italian guidelines privilege binary splitting and feminine derivation, with neographies largely pro-scribed. English documents overwhelmingly promote lexical and pronominal neutralization, including singular they and neopronouns, and eschew specification entirely. Legal framing – especially the recognition of a non-binary civil status in Germany – emerges as a key predictor of neography uptake. Despite divergent prescriptions, all guidelines condemn the generic mas-culine and seek inclusive representational equity. The paper concludes that cross-linguistic var-iation in inclusive strategies reflects structural properties of the languages, local legal contexts, and institutional ideologies, and argues for heightened intercultural dialogue in developing fu-ture policies. These findings contribute to sociolinguistic theory by evidencing how macro-social variables interact with grammatical typology to shape emergent language planning norms and practices.