France: The backlash against gender-neutral French
Emmanuel Macron is a great lover of traditional French, the language of Molière, said Martina Meister in Die Welt (Germany). He often sprinkles his conversation with quaint terms like croquignolesque (ridiculous) or gallimatias (confused chatter). That’s why when he was campaigning for president in 2017, he was distraught to see that VillersCotterêts castle, the royal hunting lodge where King Francis I signed a decree in 1539 making French the nation’s official language in place of Latin, had fallen into ruins. He had “a crazy dream” to restore it—and now he has made good. After renovating the castle at a cost of some $230 million, Macron has now inaugurated it as the Cité Internationale de la Langue Française, a museum dedicated to the French language. Next year, he will hold a summit there aiming to draw in delegates from every corner of the vast French-speaking world. While most French presidents build a “grand architectural monument,” like Georges Pompidou with his art center or François Mitterrand with his glass pyramid at the Louvre, Macron has chosen to make his mark through “saving endangered cultural heritage.”
But what no one had anticipated, said Marie Le Conte in The New European (U.K.), was that Macron would use the occasion to wade into the ongoing culture war about making French more “inclusive.” French is a gendered language, so if men and women do anything together, the word for “they” becomes ils (masculine) not elles (feminine). “Tired of being either linguistically ignored or swept aside,” feminists have proposed to reshape French to accommodate women. They want the new word for “they” to be ielles, which would encompass both genders. And they have been giving gendered nouns, such as those for professions, both masculine and feminine endings at once, with a period inside the word. Instead of male sénateurs and female sénatrices, for example, you get both with sénateur.rice.s. Actual French senators, though, are appalled by the proliferation of staccato periods, and they have put forth a bill to ban such spelling in job advertisements and government documents. And Macron has backed them, said Julie Neveux in Libération (France). In his speech opening the museum, he insisted that “the masculine is neutral” and that the language doesn’t need to be altered. Really, Mr. President? Then why is it that, unlike past presidents, you consistently address voters using both gender forms, greeting us as “Françaises, Français,” or, when speaking of all of us, saying both toutes and tous? That is “glaring proof that the president himself perceives the masculine as insufficiently generic, not entirely neutral.”
Sexism is a problem of society, not of grammar, said Samuel Petit in Le Telégramme (France). The battle for women’s equality “deserves much better than this linguistic tinkering.” French is not a blunt instrument for social change, but a living language that will naturally expand and become more inclusive as our society does. If we are all serious about recognizing the equality of women, we can use both words, masculine and feminine. Let’s not scar the language by scattering extra periods in the middle of words. It looks like “chickenpox on young children’s faces.”