“Democratization” and “gender-neutrality” are two concepts commonly used in recent studies on language variation. While both concepts link linguistic phenomena to sociocultural changes, the extent to which they overlap and/or interact has not been studied in detail. In particular, not much is known about how linguistic changes related to democratization and gender-neutrality spread across registers or varieties of English, as well as whether speakers are aware of the changes that are taking place. In this paper we review the main theoretical issues regarding these concepts and relate them to the main findings in the articles in this issue, all of which study lexical and grammatical variation from a corpus-based perspective. Taken together, they help unveil some of the conscious and unconscious mechanisms that operate at the interface between democratization and gender-neutrality.

中文翻译：

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英语中的民主化和性别中立

“民主化”和“性别中立”是近期语言变异研究中常用的两个概念。虽然这两个概念都将语言现象与社会文化变化联系起来，但尚未详细研究它们重叠和/或相互作用的程度。特别是，关于与民主化和性别中立相关的语言变化如何在英语的语域或变体中传播，以及说话者是否意识到正在发生的变化，我们知之甚少。在本文中，我们回顾了有关这些概念的主要理论问题，并将它们与本期文章中的主要发现联系起来，所有这些文章都从基于语料库的角度研究词汇和语法变化。综合起来，