Grammatische Geschlechterdarstellung in Lehrbüchern im DaF und DaZ-Unterricht : Ein Vergleich zwischen Schweden und Österreich

Sammanfattning: The focus of this thesis is to point out and compare differences or similarities in gendering between Austrian and Swedish schoolbooks in the subject German as a foreign language. The German language, in contrary to English or Swedish, differs between the semantic genera male, female and neutral. Many terms, addressing living creatures, are either semantically male or female. Throughout history the emergence of the generic masculine was consolidated. But dur-ing the last decades more and more critical voices questioned its dominance and demanded a linguistic development within the German language.Since then, different approaches to provide gender equality, especially in writing, emerged, leading both to strong support and hard denial. For many years, feministic voices fought for the visualization of women in the German language. Recently, more and more efforts were made to include the third gender, not only because of legal aspects but also because of anti-discrimination towards minorities.The examined schoolbooks did not show any attention towards a third gender but try to be gender equal towards men and women, when counting the appearance of male and female first names. The generic masculine is still overrepresented especially in the Swedish course book. Occupational titles also confirm the dominance of male expressions.