France revives culture war over bid to make language more gender-neutral
In the latest step in a long-running battle over whether to make the French language more inclusive, President Emmanuel Macron has urged its speakers "not to give in to the zeitgeist" by using gender-neutral nouns. His comments this week come as the Senate voted in favour of a proposal to ban so-called inclusive writing from official texts.
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The middle dot. For some, it's a tiny trace of France’s long march towards equality. For others, it's a mortal peril.
This humble piece of punctuation found itself at the centre of France’s latest debate over language this week – though whenever politicians object to the words people use or the way they write them, of course, it’s always about so much more.
In a language where every noun is assigned a feminine or masculine gender, and where masculine is considered the default form, feminists have long sought ways to deprogramme the gender biases out of French.
Notably, they have challenged the grammatical rule that says the masculine takes precedence over the feminine – so that 50 Frenchwomen together are “les Françaises”, but if one man joins them, they become “les Français”.
Instead, in recent years it has become common – though by no means ubiquitous – to indicate both versions alongside each other in written French, using dots to denote that they each have equal importance. Businesses might email their “cher·e·s client·e·s” (dear clients), for example, or a job ad might seek “un·e collaborateur·trice” (member of staff).
More radically, and less frequently, some opt for a third form that is neither feminine nor masculine: ending words in an x, z or asterisk instead of the conventional spellings that indicate gender, or adopting alternative pronouns such as “iel” or “al”, the equivalent of “they/them” in English.
But such practices, known broadly as inclusive writing, tend to provoke strong reactions in a country where “proper” French is rigidly codified and jealously guarded – including by the President himself.
‘Protecting’ French
“In our language, the masculine serves as the neutral form. We don’t need to add dots or dashes or other things in the middle of words to make it understood,” Macron declared on Monday.
Speaking as he opened a new museum of the French language, the President urged his audience “not to give in to the zeitgeist”.
Later the same day, the Senate – the upper house of France’s parliament – passed a proposal to “protect the French language from the abuses of so-called inclusive writing” by banning it from all official texts.
Adopted by 221 votes to 82, the bill will only become law if it is also approved by the larger lower house, the National Assembly, which is far from guaranteed.
The proposed ban, put forward by the right-wing Les Republicans party, would apply to birth and marriage certificates, school or university exams and dissertations, court documents, employment contracts, company regulations, instruction manuals and other administrative texts.
Its supporters claim they are acting to defend French from ideology and save language learners from added difficulty.
“Inclusive writing weakens the French language by rendering it unreadable, unpronounceable and impossible to teach,” declared Pascale Gruny, one of the senators who tabled the bill.
Linguistic panic
She is not the first to seek to outlaw inclusive language.
It has been banished from the wording of legislation since 2017. The Education Ministry has already instructed schools not to use it, while a similar ban – which would have made the use of inclusive conventions in administrative documents punishable by a fine of up to €7,500 – was proposed in 2021, without coming to anything.
In France, like in other countries, resistance to gender-neutral formulations falls into the same culture wars being fought over transgender rights and the teaching of progressive ideas in schools and universities.
“The right-wing understood, and some politicians understood, that language is a way of separating left and right,” Eliane Viennot, a literature professor and author of a feminist history of the French language, told RFI's Spotlight on France podcast.
“And they want to please, to seduce the French population which is a little old, a little conservative, and they know it works.”
The opposition is also stoked by the Académie Française, the deeply conservative institution that sees itself as the guardian of the French language – without having any actual authority to regulate it.
For decades its almost exclusively male members have deplored attempts to redress linguistic gender bias, resisting the use of feminine forms of job titles for women doctors, MPs, teachers and the like until 2019.
It has called inclusive writing a “mortal danger” for French and accuses its proponents of failing to understand grammar. In a typically bombastic memo from 2021, the academy even claims gender-neutral phrasing will discourage foreigners from learning French as a second language and – horror! – drive them towards English instead.
But Viennot called the practice of inserting middle dots, the target of so much handwringing, “peanuts”. “It’s just a sign to note an abbreviation,” she said with some exasperation.
“They are crazy; they transform these technical subjects into a state affair.”
No such thing as neutral
“I would say that French people are quite reactionary about language. Each time they feel language has changed, it’s like a crisis,” commented Julie Abbou, a linguist who specialises in gender and language.
“But actually language changes all the time.”
Speaking to RFI back in 2017, she pointed out that the rules French follows today weren’t always set in stone. In fact, until the 17th century it was just as acceptable to make adjectives agree with whichever noun was closest to them in the sentence rather than defaulting to masculine, a convention known as “agreement by proximity”.
That changed as French became more strictly standardised – not least by the newly formed Académie Française, whose founding fathers declared the masculine “the more noble gender”, according to Abbou.
It’s easy to see, in cases like this one, how centuries of patriarchy have left their mark on French. While the bill passed by the Senate may claim that “with so-called inclusive writing, the language loses its intrinsic neutrality to become a political and ideological marker”, the truth is it was never neutral to begin with.
And though the bill’s supporters accuse those advocating for changes of activism, arguing for the status quo is equally politically motivated.
“This is not linguistic resistance, but ideological resistance and social resistance,” said Abbou.
“When you touch on language questions, you are touching on really affective issues, especially in French, for historical reasons ... But I think also for more identity reasons and identity motives, people don’t want to see changes in the gender system.”
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