Talking Gender: Beyond the Binary

Although there are people who struggle to identify within a gender binary, the existence of two opposite genders is often accepted as given and natural. As the awareness of nonbinary identities has spread over the last decades, a lot of linguistic changes have been made to give people the tools to make their voices heard. Language more than ever has become a means of power and representation: words do not just describe aspects of the world, but “play a role in shaping concepts and in challenging thoughts and actions” (Cameron and Kulick, 2003). The aim of this dissertation is to analyse the power of language with regards to non-binary genders and to demonstrate how different languages, namely English, Italian, German and Japanese, react differently to a deeper understanding of gender.