What Is Inclusive Language?

Inclusive language is a set of terminology practices in professional and technical communication aimed at wording that is clear and accessible to readers regardless of race, gender, disability status, age, or cultural background. In engineering contexts it is primarily a terminology question rather than a tone question: which words a specification, an application programming interface, a variable name, or a user manual uses to denote a technical concept, and whether those words carry meanings unrelated to the concept being described. The practical argument made by standards bodies is that ambiguous or loaded terms cost precision, since a reader who must decode a metaphor is a reader who may decode it wrong.

The subject entered formal standards work in the late 2010s and accelerated after 2020, when several organizations issued written guidance. It intersects with technical writing style, terminology management, and the governance processes that standards development organizations use to reach consensus on vocabulary.

Terminology in Standards and Specifications

The most visible work has been the replacement of specific term pairs in protocol documents and hardware specifications. The IESG statement on inclusive language asks Internet-Draft and RFC authors to use terminology that is clear, precise, and widely accessible, and points them to external style guidance rather than maintaining a separate IETF word list. RFC 9454, published in 2023, renamed the master and slave roles in the OSPF specifications to leader and follower, a change that preserved the protocol semantics exactly while removing a metaphor that had never described the relationship well. Similar substitutions have replaced whitelist and blacklist with allowlist and denylist, terms that also read unambiguously to non-native English speakers who might not associate the colors with permission and denial.

The IETF's terminology working documents, including the long-running draft on terminology, power, and inclusive language in Internet-Drafts and RFCs, record the debate over how far such guidance should extend and how it interacts with the need to reference historical documents accurately. IEEE 802 and other IEEE working groups have run parallel efforts to review terminology in existing and draft standards.

Written Style Guidance

Formal guidance documents give writers concrete substitutions rather than general principles. NIST Internal Report 8366, guidance for NIST staff on using inclusive language in documentary standards, draws on NIST author instructions, the American Psychological Association style guide, and the Chicago Manual of Style, and it lists expressions to avoid alongside recommended alternatives. Its recurring principles include using gender-neutral constructions in place of generic masculine pronouns, describing people by the characteristic that is relevant to the discussion rather than by an incidental one, and preferring literal technical description over metaphor. Guidance on disability terminology distinguishes person-first phrasing from identity-first phrasing and notes that preference varies by community, which is a case where the guidance recommends judgment rather than a fixed rule.

Implementation in Engineering Practice

Applying the guidance to a live codebase or standard is a version control and compatibility problem as much as an editorial one. Renaming an identifier in a public interface breaks compilation for downstream consumers, so projects typically introduce the new term as an alias, deprecate the old one over a release cycle, and update documentation first. Automated linters flag terms in source, commit messages, and documentation during continuous integration. Standards bodies face a further constraint: normative references to published documents must quote those documents accurately, so historical terminology often persists in citations even after the surrounding text has been revised.

Applications

Inclusive language practice has applications in a range of settings, including:

• Standards development at IETF, IEEE, W3C, and national standards bodies
• Open source project documentation, code review, and contributor guidelines
• Software identifier and application programming interface naming conventions
• Technical manuals, datasheets, and product user interfaces
• Academic publishing and conference submission guidelines
• Engineering education materials and curriculum design