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Degendering a gendered language: French ‘écriture inclusive’ ✍️
PLUS: Mozart’s Moral Labyrinths, The Rise of Artificial Intelligence and Rewriting the Origins of Writing 🗿
MFL
Degendering a Gendered Language: French ‘écriture inclusive’ ✍️
Unlike English, many languages – including French – are gendered. This means that all nouns (and other parts of language that refer to these nouns) are assigned a grammatical gender – in the case of French, masculine or feminine – even where there doesn’t appear to be any logic behind it. For inanimate nouns, this isn’t really a big deal, but when it comes to talking about people, this can be a huge problem. In French, every pronoun, every job title, every word that describes a person, has to have a gender, which has a big impact on issues to do with equality, particularly in terms of gender equality, and how non-binary people can express themselves. And this is where the écriture inclusive (inclusive writing) movement comes in, as people look for solutions to these problems.
💡 Things to consider
Tradition vs. progress: In France, there is an age-old debate surrounding the protection of the French language in its traditional form. France has a specific institution, the Académie française, whose role is to act as a ‘guardian’ of the French language. However, as society has progressed, the Académie française has often failed to keep up. For example, historically, high offices were held by men, and thus only a masculine form of the noun denotes these roles – e.g. président, ambassadeur, premier ministre. The feminine forms – présidente, ambassadrice, première ministre – were used to denote the wife of the postholder. But, nowadays, should these words retain their original meaning, leaving female postholders to use masculine job titles, or should the language evolve to give the feminine forms an equal meaning to the masculine? Some argue that in a gendered language, the masculine can be viewed as a sort of ‘neutral default’, but is this acceptable? Can something labelled ‘masculine’ ever be truly neutral?
The Académie française, with swords to defend the French language
Non-binary identities within a gendered language: In a language where everything is gendered, how can a non-binary person express their identity? In French, one of the main ways that people are working around this is by creating neologisms (newly invented words) that don’t have a specific gender, by combining both the masculine and feminine forms: for example, il (he) + elle (she) = iel (they, singular). Even a word such as ‘everyone’ is gendered in French (masculine: tous; feminine: toutes), so the neologism toustes has been created to incorporate both. However, is combining masculine and feminine forms – i.e. both binary forms – doing enough for non-binary people?
Oui … c’est compliqué
Gender-neutral descriptions: Adjectives, and nouns (most importantly to this debate, job titles), are gendered, so how do we make these accessible for non-binary people, or even groups that include several genders, without resorting to a default masculine? People often joke that, in French, a group of 99 women and 1 man would still be described using masculine adjectives, but this is the reality, and many people are looking to change this. Currently, the favoured option is using the point médian (·) in the middle of a word to demarcate both forms. The word for ‘intelligent’ is intelligent in masculine and intelligente in feminine, so a non-binary person or someone following the practices of écriture inclusive (inclusive writing) could instead use intelligent·e. However, this is hard to make clear when you’re speaking aloud, and again it still relies on the binary. Are there any better solutions?
That 1 man amongst 99 women
🔎 Find out more
🍒 The cherry on top
🎼 Mozart’s Moral Labyrinths: Mozart’s operas aren’t just beautiful musical dramas - they’re subtle tests of our own moral judgment. In this thought-provoking Aeon essay, Dorian Bandy explores how works like Così fan tutte and Don Giovanni draw audiences into emotionally complex situations, encouraging sympathy for characters whose actions are often flawed, contradictory, or morally ambiguous. A fascinating read for anyone interested in Music, Philosophy, or Ethics!
🤖 The Rise of Artificial Intelligence: How did AI evolve from a science-fiction dream into a technology that shapes everyday life? This documentary traces the journey from Alan Turing’s early experiments and the first “thinking machines” to modern neural networks, self-driving cars, chatbots, and superhuman game-playing systems, while exploring both the remarkable achievements and persistent limitations of machine learning. A fascinating watch for anyone interested in Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science, or Technology & Society!
🗿 Rewriting the Origins of Writing: What if one of humanity’s earliest writing systems has been hiding in plain sight? This intriguing New Scientist article explores the mystery of Proto-Elamite, a largely undeciphered 5,000-year-old script that may represent one of the first attempts to capture spoken language in written form, potentially reshaping our understanding of how writing evolved beyond simple record-keeping. A fascinating read for anyone interested in Archaeology, Linguistics, or Ancient History!
👀 Keep your eyes peeled for…
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That’s it for this week! We’d like to thank this week’s writer: James Pearne.
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