A ban on the use of gender-neutral language forms came into force in public institutions in the traditionally conservative southern German state of Bavaria on Monday. Like many European languages, German has different masculine and feminine forms for some nouns, and in the past used the masculine plural as the all-inclusive default form. For example, “Autor” is the word for a male writer, and “Autorin” a female writer. The plural forms are “Autoren” and “Autorinnen.” “Autoren” was previously used to mean “writers,” not just male writers. Some have argued that “Autoren” is grammatically masculi…