Prepared for the Committee on Bible Translation by: Collins Dictionaries, Westerhill Road, Bishopbriggs, Glasgow

Introduction

This report presents the results of a significant original study of gender language in English over the last 20 years. Three areas of usage are described:

1. generic pronouns and determiners: the types of pronouns and determiners that are used to refer to indefinite pronouns (such as someone, everybody and one) and non-gender specific nouns (such as a person, each child and any teacher):
   1. masculine (he, his, himself, etc.);
   2. feminine (she, her, herself, etc.);
   3. plural/gender-neutral (they, them, one, themselves, etc.);
   4. alternative forms (s/he, him or her, his/her, etc.)
2. mankind, man and synonyms: the use of the terms man, mankind, humankind, humanity, humans, human beings, the human race and people in the sense ‘the human species’ or ‘humans collectively’.
3. forefather, ancestor and father: the use of the terms forefather(s), ancestor(s) and father(s) in the sense ‘a person/people from whom one is descended’ or ‘the founder(s) of a movement/nation etc.’

The study was undertaken using parts of Collins’ 4.4 billion word corpus holdings and was facilitated by state-of-the-art computational tools described in section 3. The study draws from balanced sub-corpora of general written English, general spoken English, US written English and US spoken English, as well as an additional custom-built corpus of Evangelical English assembled from a wide variety of evangelical books, sermons and internet sites.  As part of the study, the research team also sought insights into southern American English, assembling a substantial sub-corpus using extracts from the Houston Chronicle. On analysis, however, it was found that the Houston Chronicle data did not differ in any material way from the broader holdings in the US spoken sub-corpus. For this reason, and also because the sub-corpus was so narrowly based, it was not used by the committee in its work. It has therefore been omitted from this report.