L’inclusività dell’italiano tra politica del linguaggio ed epistemologia comparativa

In this note the author first clarifies how he understands the notions of inclusiveness and comparative epistemology. Then, in Section 2, he assesses the extent to which Italian is inclusive as compared with English and argues that Italian is more inclusive than English chiefly due to Italian being a pro-drop language and having a gender-neutral possessive adjective. According to the author, to assess the inclusiveness of a given language one should focus on how often one cannot avoid producing a gendered sentence. In Section 3, the author discusses two types of strategies to make Italian even more inclusive: a gradualist and a maximalist strategy. The gradualist strategy consists of reducing the frequency of gendered sentences with a variety of tools as well as waiting for speakers and grammarians to come up with new solutions for unsolved issues. The maximalist strategy consists of replacing the over-extended masculine with the over-extended feminine due to the connection of feminine with abstraction and collectiveness in many Indo-European languages (and even some non-Indo-European ones).