Gatekeepers of French promise to look at ‘feminising’ titles

THE official guardians of the French language are poised to accept feminine versions of professions and titles after 20 years of stonewalling the idea, in the latest twist in the battle for linguistic gender equality.

The Académie Française has been at the heart of a heated row in recent weeks over whether French is sexist by design and requires fundamental change.

Feminists have accused the Immortals, as the institution’s mainly male members are called, of being behind the curve after the body came out staunchly against so-called “inclusive writing” – an attempt to make French grammar more politically correct and gender neutral – warning it placed the language in “mortal peril”.

It has now emerged that the purists are to look at rubber-stamping a string of female versions of titles, ranks and professions in response to a request by the president of the Court de Cassation, France’s supreme court.

Until now the masculine was de rigueur unless a profession was mainly conducted by women, or a woman made a special request to be referred to that way. In a letter, the court’s presiding judge Bernard Louvel pointed out that “the use of feminine versions of posts has spread throughout the public service and the judicial corps”. The French justice ministry, he said, had for some time referred to a female presiding judge as “la présidente” or “la juge” instead of “le président” or “le juge” and a female prosecutor as “la procureure” rather than “le procureur”.

“Has usage sufficiently evolved to lead the Académie to change its point of view?,” he enquired.

Hélène Carrère d’encausse, the “perpetuel secretary” of the Académie, conceded that it was time to consider revising the rules.