Gender-inclusive textims: How spanish-speaking educational communities promote linguistic innovations on Twitter

Abstract

Any linguistic reform aimed at gender equality benefits from teacher’s capacity as spreaders, and literature has shown that Twitter can be used as an excellent channel for the dissemination of good practice in language use. In a mixed-methods study based on public data mining and semantic content analysis, we examine how teachers use gender-fair language (GIL) in their digital communications on Twitter, what GIL procedures they use and, if Spanish digitalk incorporates specific textisms for GIL. Results confirmed that teachers make a widespread use of GIL procedures, prefer the use of collective nouns as a GIL mechanism, and intentionally incorporate GIL into digitalk through specific textisms, what we have named gender-inclusive textisms (GIT). The findings indicate that teachers are at the forefront of gender-inclusive language activism in educational virtual communities, and that, although Twitter may contain messages that infringe upon individuals’ dignity, it is also a privileged space for linguistic innovations oriented towards gender equality