Gendered language use has been the subject of both research and debate within linguistics for over half a century. Yet, in the last decade, the topic has emerged with renewed urgency, led primarily by the work in queer and trans linguistics, aiming to include and linguistically make visible individuals whose gender is not binary. As gender identity has become a relevant issue in public life and, especially in Western countries, political debates, the question of how gender-inclusive language (GIL) is received and taken up has become a prominent and highly contested aspect of language change.

Whereas linguists often cast a light on changes below the level of awareness, this collection looks into what happens when changes are visible, openly debated, and often resisted in media, policy, and daily life. In fourteen chapters, the volume explores public reactions and private attitudes toward GIL across typologically and culturally diverse linguistic contexts. These include languages with widely adopted inclusive forms, such as gender-neutral pronouns in English (they) and Swedish (hen), those with varying yet significant levels of institutional and ideological resistance (French, German, Italian), and, finally, others where discussions of GIL are best described as emergent or structurally constrained (Mandarin, Polish, Romanian). The editor’s introduction frames the dynamic changes through the lens of attitudes, rather than usage or policy alone, marking a notable and needed contribution to the field.

Several chapters focus on the discursive and ideological framing of GIL in public and media discourse. In French, for instance, Ann Coady as well as Paige Johnson show how écriture inclusive is portrayed as a threat to national identity, often drawing on metaphors of corruption or decline. In German, Falco Pfalzgraf analyzes publications by a purist language association, highlighting how GIL is constructed as a politically motivated intrusion into language norms. These and other chapters reveal how opposition to inclusive forms is frequently rooted in broader anxieties about authority, tradition, and cultural coherence rather than concerns over grammar per se.

Other chapters turn to the analysis of attitudes among language users themselves, providing new insights and occasionally novel methodological tools. For example, Hanna Bruns & Swantje Leiting, writing on German, find that while many express support for inclusive forms, this does not always align with usage. Lisa Zacharski, Rosalba Nodari, and Xiaoduan Fan & Laurel Lawyer further investigate attitudes across educational and national contexts, identifying how political orientation, age, and exposure shape both acceptance and resistance to GIL.

The volume’s comparative scope and methodological breadth reveal patterns that would otherwise remain invisible. By including languages such as Polish, Romanian, and Mandarin, the volume also begins to do what is increasingly necessary: challenge the Anglocentric and Western European bias that continues to shape much of the scholarship in the field. Finally, the work captures a politically charged, largely bottom-up shift in language use with both empirical insight and timely relevance. It will be of interest to scholars in sociolinguistics, discourse studies, psycholinguistics, prescriptivism, and linguistic anthropology, and, more broadly, those working at the intersection of language, ideology, and social change.