This is a post by Martina Rosola, Mara Floris (Università Vita Salute San Raffaele), Daniela Ruzzante (University of Trento, Italy), Elena Sofia Safina, Igor Facchini, Giuseppe Di Dona (University of Trento, Italy), Giuliano Torrengo (University of Milan).
Gender-fair language strategies are not made equal. These ways to overcome linguistic sexism differ in realization and goals, and have different advantages and limitations. Gender-fair strategies typically arise in activist settings, but can’t scientific research help in this enterprise? Currently, gender-fair strategies are experimented in the wild, through trial and error; scientific research can sustain this process by testing and improving existing solutions…but also by identifying new possible strategies. And that’s what we did in this paper: based on their features, we hypothesized that diphthongs could serve as gender-fair strategies in Italian and tested their chances to do so. We investigated how gendered they are perceived to be by Italian native speakers, and compared them to one another to identify the most gender-neutral ones. Before delving into the study, let’s take a step back to explain why we thought diphthongs would be especially promising.
Among the gender-fair strategies currently in use, some consist in substituting masculine and feminine grammatical gender encoding with letters (e.g., x, u, y) or symbols (e.g., *, @, ə) to yield gender-neutral or non-binary words. Using “latinx” instead of “latina” or “latino” is an example of this strategy. In this (Spanish) example, the letter “x” works as a grammatical gender encoding device alternative to the feminine (“a”) and masculine (“o”). Such Alternative grammatical Gender Encoding Devices (AGEDs), however, present several limitations. On the one hand, some symbols (e.g., @, _, *) are unpronounceable and, thus, cannot be used as such in oral communication. But even pronounceable AGEDs face specific challenges. Take, for instance, the schwa (ə): the corresponding sound does not exist in the phonological inventory of standard Italian and it does not usually occur in stressed syllables.
Crucially – and luckily -, the AGEDs so far explored for Italian are not the only possible ones. In particular, diphthongs (with the exception of “ai”) have not been proposed and used yet. “Ok, but why diphthongs?”, you might ask. The short answer is: diphthongs are pronounceable and already part of the Italian phonological repertoire. These characteristics place them at a prima facie advantage compared to strategies that cannot be pronounced (like the x or asterisk) or that require changes to a deep level of the language such as phonology (like the schwa). Now, whether this advantage is factual or only theoretical is an empirical question, and calls for an empirical study – which is indeed what we conducted.
In this study, we wanted to explore whether diphthongs could work as Alternative grammatical Gender Encoding Devices (AGEDs). That is, whether diphthongs could replace masculine and feminine grammatical gender encoding to yield gender-neutral or non-binary words. Since the hypothesized pros of diphthongs concern their pronounceability and phonological status, we employed audio recordings for our test. The 520 participants of our online survey had to rate, on 5- and 3-points Likert scales, for gender and number audios where diphthongs worked as AGEDs. Our assumption was that a diphthong that doesn’t receive a strongly gendered interpretation has better chances to work as an AGED. Hence, the main focus of our study was to investigate the gender perception of diphthongs used as AGEDs. The goal was to check whether all Italian diphthongs are interpreted as equally gendered and, if not, identify the most gender-neutrally interpreted ones. We also asked for the number interpretation because in Italian, both number and grammatical gender are encoded by the same device. Unlike English or Spanish, Italian doesn’t use the “s” for the plural: the “e” in “filosofe” (philosophers) encodes both feminine grammatical gender and plural number, the singular being “filosofa”. Hence, ideally one would need two AGEDs for Italian, one for the singular and another for the plural. Again, the assumption was that employing diphthongs that are already interpreted as more singular (or plural) would be easier than trying to force a plural-interpreted diphthong to work as a plural AGED.
So, we hypothesized that the diphthongs that would have better chances to work as AGEDs are those that speakers already interpret as more gender-neutral and as either singular or plural. The goal of our online survey was to identify such diphthongs, if any existed (that is, it was possible that all diphthongs were interpreted equally gendered). To this end, we selected 10 Italian roots of nouns referring to humans and combined them with each of the 14 diphthongs of Italian (namely, ai, au, ei, eu, ia, ie, io, iu, oi, ou, ua, ue, ui, uo). We picked nouns that have distinct feminine and masculine forms differentiated by the word ending, such as “cugina”/“cugino” (female cousin/male cousin), and made sure to avoid nouns associated with gendered stereotypes, such as “nurse” and “engineer”. Every noun was further presented either in the feminine or in the masculine form to check that the participants were not giving random answers or were not hearing the words properly.
We did find that some Italian diphthongs are indeed interpreted as more gender-neutral than others. Among the diphthongs interpreted as the most plural, ei, ia, and ai were interpreted to be significantly more gender-neutral than the others. Among the diphthongs interpreted as the most singular, eu and ue were interpreted to be significantly more gender-neutral than the others. Moreover, ei was the diphthong interpreted as more gender-neutral overall, that is, when number judgements were not considered. So, the best diphthong candidate AGEDs for Italian are ei, ia, and ai for plural and eu and ue for the singular. So far so good, but are they better or worse than AGEDs already in use, such as the schwa and the u? The experiment conducted so far doesn’t answer this question…but we are currently running a second study comparing the selected diphthongs for the plural with the schwa and the u. This first study provided interesting information in itself, namely that not all Italian diphthongs are interpreted alike. Moreover, it was crucial for the next step: the second one will be an eye-tracking study, and we needed to narrow down the candidate AGEDs to test. So, if you’re interested in what the most promising AGEDs for the plural Italian are, you cannot miss our next work. We’ll be back with a comparison between the diphthongs that emerged from this study (ei, ia, and ai) and the pronounceable AGEDs already in use (u and schwa). Stay tuned!
To learn more about this topic, see our article, “Double vowels, double fairness? Assessing the viability of diphthongs as novel strategies for gender fairness in Italian”, Language Sciences, Volume 116, 2026, 101812, ISSN 0388-0001,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2026.101812.
Martina Rosola, PhD, is a philosopher of language, specializing in Feminist and Social Philosophy of Language as well as in the intersections of Philosophy of Language and Linguistics such as Semantics and Pragmatics. She works on gender-fair language and genericity.
Mara Floris is a researcher in philosophy at Università Vita Salute San Raffaele, working at the intersection of epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophy of medicine.
Daniela Ruzzante is an Assistant Professor (RTT) at the Department of Psychology and Cognitive Science, University of Trento (Italy). Her research interests span social psychology and social neuroscience, with a focus on dehumanization, objectification, gendered spaces, and human–environment interactions, and their physiological and behavioural consequences.
Elena Sofia Safina, PhD, is a linguist whose research lies at the intersection of psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics, with a particular focus on language and gender and, more specifically, on the neutralization of grammatical gender in Italian. Her research interests also encompass linguistic discrimination and multilingualism.
Igor Facchini holds a PhD in Translation, Interpreting, and Intercultural Studies from the University of Bologna. His research evaluates gender-fair language guidelines and innovations among public communicators and conference interpreters working with Italian, English, and French.
Giuseppe Di Dona is a post-doc researcher at the Department of Psychology and Cognitive Science, University of Trento (Italy). His research spans across cognitive neuroscience, visual perception, speech perception, psycholinguistics, reading and related neurodevelopmental disorders.
Giuliano Torrengo is Full Professor of Philosophy in the “Piero Martinetti” Department of Philosophy at the University of Milan. His research interests include the philosophy of time, the philosophy of language, and social ontology.
