Lufthansa to ditch ‘ladies and gentlemen’ for gender-neutral greetings

German aviation
giant Lufthansa has announced it will adopt gender-neutral greetings for
passengers in the future. In a statement, the company said that all airlines in
the group, including Lufthansa, Eurowings and Brussels Airlines, will ditch the
traditional “ladies and gentlemen” greetings for travellers and will be simply
referred to as “guests” or with something like “Good morning here on board”.

“Diversity
and equality are core values for our company and our corporate culture. From
now on, we want to express this attitude in our language as well — and show
that diversity is not just a phrase, but a lived reality,” the company said in
its statement, according to CNN.

Other airlines
have taken similar steps in recent years, like Japan’s JAL in 2020, European
budget carrier EasyJet and Canada’s flagship Air Canada in 2019.

Lufthansa the
company has been using gender-neutral language for internal communication since
January, 2021 and it will adopt linguistic changes for contracts and other
documents in the future.

“We have
not banned addressing our guests as ‘Dear Sir or Madam’ — our aim is to
welcome everyone on board on an equal basis,” the company said, adding that cabin
crew have been given the liberty to choose the exact wordings based on “the
context and situation”.

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In response
to questions about whether this change will be adopted in various other
languages and regions, a spokesperson said, “the issue of gender-neutral
language varies from country to country”.

In English,
nouns are mostly gender-neutral but in languages like German, French, Spanish
and Italian, nouns are gender specific. The extent to which the company will
change its greetings for other languages, “depends on whether gender-neutral
language is already being used in the various countries and is already made
possible by responsible institutions (such as the German Spelling Council),”
the spokesperson said.