Many linguists I spoke to stressed that changing a language doesn’t guarantee a change in perception this leads some of them to say that inclusive writing just isn’t worth the trouble. These and other recommendations have collectively become known as Some have even recommended creating a gender-neutral pronoun (the equivalent of how “they” is sometimes used in English, or “hen” in Sweden). s, which would read as “male musicians and female musicians”).The feminine ending, thus indicating both gendered versions of every noun (like musicien Many also recommend a grammatical tool that consists of adding a “median-period” at the end of masculine nouns, followed by Most recommend creating feminine versions of all professional nouns and/or using neutral nouns whenever possible. Meaning that if you have a room full of ten women and just one man, you have to describe the whole group in the masculine.įeminists who believe that these features of the French language put women at a disadvantage disagree about how best to remedy them. What’s more, French students are taught that “the masculine dominates over the feminine,” So, a male minister is le ministre and a female minister is la ministre. And there are many nouns (including those referring to professions) that don’t have feminine versions. The language has no neutral grammatical gender. So, le policier is a policeman la policière is a policewoman. Nouns, and adjectives reflect the gender of the object to which they refer. Clearly in the second camp, the office of Prime Minister Edouard Philippe announced this week that it’s banning the use of gender-neutral French in all official government documents. There’s not enough evidence that changing a language can really change social realities.

They complained that implementing it would badly complicate education, and that Educating the next generation in a gender-inclusive way, they claimed, would yield concrete positive changes, like professional environments that are more welcoming to women.

So the uproar was almost instantaneous when, this fall, the first-ever school textbook promoting a gender-neutral version of French was released.Ī subset of French feminists who had argued that the gendered nature of the language promotes sexist outcomes, and that shifting to a gender-neutral version would improve women’s status in society. That’s why any attempt at changing the language is often met with suspicion. “My homeland is the French language,” author Albert Camus once wrote-and many French people would agree.

Assigning gender to inanimate objects