Purists attack new gender-inclusive French

NEW gender-inclusive spellings pose a “mortal danger” to the purity of French, according to the Académie Française, France’s four-century-old “language police”.

The august body of luminaries has infuriated feminists by condemning the politically correct, gender-neutral version of French now being adopted by Emmanuel Macron’s government, the civil service and academics in an attempt to avoid offending or excluding women and transgender people.

Under standard rules, amis (friends) covers both women and men. The feminine plural, amies, is used only when no men are included. Under the new “écriture inclusive”, a mid punctuation point is inserted, so ‘amis’ (friends) becomes ami·e·s to refer to both genders.

The “immortels” – as the Académie’s 40 members are known – would become “immortel·le·s” to include its handful of women members. But the Académie declared: “Faced with this ‘inclusive’ aberration, the French language is in mortal danger.”

Jean-michel Blanquer, the education minister, questioned the wisdom of trying to teach inclusive spelling in schools. Purists compared it to George Orwell’s Newspeak, the language of restricted grammar and limited vocabulary, from Nineteen Eighty-four.