Lingua, linguaggio, genere e inclusività: conceptualising language and gender in Italian.

In this chapter, I explain how terminology has been used in Italian to study: a. gendered language, i.e., feminisation of job-titles in traditionally masculine spaces, and b. gender-inclusive language, i.e. strategies used to refer to non-binary people or to address genericity. The terminology is first seen through the existing work done since the 1980s, covering the two conceptualisation of gender – binary and non-binary. Subsequently, I conduct a thorough a quanti-tative investigation, examining the corpus Italian Trends (2014-today) avail-able through SketchEngine; results show that some terms are stable through-out the 10 years investigated while others emerge later, e.g. schwa. Schwa is used as a metonym for gender-inclusive language, being the strategy that cap-tured the attention of speakers, critics and linguists. Because of this, schwa has also become a political tool that far-right newspapers use to attack the left and more specifically, Elly Schlein, the first female secretary of Partito Demo-cratico. This is investigated in the second part of the analysis.