The German Word Thesaurus and socio-cultural models

For the purposes of the study, the authors have compiled a corpus of gender terms from the Microsoft Word Thesaurus in order to show how new technologies interact with gender categorizations in German, and how these are related to their culture and society. The results obtained from the present analysis show that the so-called new media, far from giving due weight to the most recent issues regarding the linguistic representation of women and men and their categorisation, seem on the contrary to perpetuate socio-cultural models that in actual society are well on the way to becoming obsolete.