In the past chapters, you have encountered a number of nouns that showed –in at the end. Many German nouns that refer to professions have a masculine form (referring to male people practicing that profession) and create the feminine form by adding –in (referring to female people practicing that profession). This also works for some nationalities. Here are some examples:

In the past, the generic masculine form has often been used to not only indicate a male person practicing a specific profession but also for situations where the gender of the person was unknown or when talking in the plural about a group of people that also included women.

In order to achieve more gender equality in the language, various alternative forms of spelling were created, such as the internal capitalized i (StudentIn, einE StudentIn) or using both forms (Student und Studentin).

While these forms emphasize both feminine and masculine forms, they leave out diverse and nonbinary gender identities. Just like in the English language, several gender-inclusive forms were created for German, such as the gender-gap (Student_in, ein_e Student_in) or the gender-star (Student*in, ein*e Student*in).

With some words, a gender-neutral form is possible that derives from a verb participle or adjective, or is a synonym or an abstraction, for example: der/die Studierende.

In this beginning German textbook, we have opted to write out both feminine and masculine forms of nouns at first, because they are still the commonly used forms in the German-speaking countries. As we further progress through the book, we will start using gender-neutral forms like “Studierende” whenever possible.