Man and woman balancing on a triangle

Teilnehmer*innen, TeilnehmerInnen or Teilnehmer(innen)?

Written by: K.J.J. Maes (Kasper) MA 09 February 2024

What do you think of when you hear the term ‘gender debate’? More women in top jobs? Equal pay for men and women? Gender-neutral toilets? Chances are pretty slim that you’re thinking of punctuation marks like asterisks, slashes and underscores. It’s also fairly unlikely that this idea will cause your blood pressure to spike and your face to turn red. Matters are somewhat different if you live in Germany, because then you can’t escape it. A gender debate has been raging for several years amongst our eastern neighbours.

Language problem

While our farmers, nurses and teachers take to the streets, Germans worry about how to express equality between men, women and other genders in the language. So, how exactly does this work?

Suppose you work at a German company and are organising an event. You want to send an email with information to all participants. The opening is pretty simple in Dutch and in English: Geachte deelnemers or Dear participants. In German: Sehr geehrte Teilnehmer. You would think so, at least. But it’s not that simple. The word Teilnehmer also has a feminine form: Teilnehmerin. And the plural form is Teilnehmerinnen. So people who choose Sehr geehrte Teilnehmer are only addressing the male participants. And not the women and other genders. How do you solve this problem?

Infinite possibilities

Now it gets really fun, as the creative Germans have come up with a seemingly endless number of possibilities. You can name both sexes, with the ladies first, of course: Sehr geehrte Teilnehmerinnen, sehr geehrte Teilnehmer. But you can also use all sorts of punctuation, such as:

  • the ‘Gendersternchen’ (gender asterisk): Sehr geehrte Teilnehmer*innen
  • the slash: Sehr geehrte Teilnehmer/-innen
  • brackets: Sehr geehrte Teilnehmer(innen)
  • the ‘Gender Gap’: Sehr geehrte Teilnehmer_innen
  • Or the ‘Inner-I’ (capital i): Sehr geehrte TeilnehmerInnen

Is that it? Of course not - there are even more obscure solutions. How about a footnote at the bottom of the text containing the following disclaimer: In diesem Text wird ausschließlich die männliche Form verwendet. Damit sind alle anderen Formen gleichermaßen mitgemeint. Sounds a bit like the disclaimer in movies that ‘no animals were harmed on set.’

Gender dictionary

When the gender debate reached its height, there was even brief talk that Duden (the German Van Dale) would include the form with ‘Gendersternchen’. So Teilnehmer*in instead of Teilnehmer. This is a little too far even for the politically correct language community. However, there has been a genuine online gender dictionary (geschicktgendern.de) with alternative, gender-neutral terms since 2015. Anyone can suggest creative variations on words like Hausfrau (haushaltsführende Person), Ampelmännchen (Ampelfigur) or Pilot (flugzeugführende Belegschaft) on it. So if you’re inspired...

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Written by
K.J.J. Maes (Kasper) MA
K.J.J. Maes (Kasper) MA
Kasper was a Senior German Trainer for a large proportion of his 13-year tenure at Radboud In’to Languages. Today, as an innovator, he focuses entirely on setting up new projects to renew and improve our education together with his colleagues.