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LEARNING FRENCH

What is ‘inclusive writing’ and what does it mean for French noun rules?

It's frequently the target of attacks, usually from those on the political right, but what is inclusive writing and exactly how does it work with French grammar rules?

What is 'inclusive writing' and what does it mean for French noun rules?
Photo: Denis Charlet/AFP

What is inclusive writing?

As we know, every object in France has a gender and unlike languages such as German which have a neutral option, in French it must be either masculine or feminine.

This isn’t a problem when referring to la table, but does have an effect on things like job titles, or members of certain groups.

Revealed: The simple trick to get the gender of French nouns (mostly) right

So making French gender inclusive is a little more complicated than in English where one can – for example – substitute the word fireman for firefighter, which covers both male and female employees of the fire service.

Feminine forms for traditionally masculine roles are now commonplace in French. Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo uses the feminine la présidente rather than the traditional Mme le président, for example, on her Twitter bio (that’s referring to her presidency of the AIMF mayors group).

And government documents deliberately use both masculine and feminine – referring, for example, to le candidat ou la candidate, and recognise feminine forms for professions – la ministre, la secrétaire générale or la directrice.

As well as creating feminine versions of all professional nouns, feminists and egalitarians have recommend a grammatical tool that consists of adding a “median-point” at the end of masculine nouns, followed by the feminine ending, to indicate both gendered versions.

This is known as écriture inclusive (inclusive writing).

Here are some examples:

  • musicien·ne·s – which refers to a male musician (musicien), a female musician (musicienne) and the masculine and feminine plural (musiciens, musiciennes)
  • citoyen·ne·s – a male citizen (citoyen) a female citizen (citoyenne) or the masculine and feminine plural (citoyens, citoyennes)
  • acteur·rice·s – a male actor (acteur), an actress (actrice) or masculine and feminine plural (acteurs, actrices

So this is widely used?

It’s becoming more widespread, but the two places that you will most likely see it are in government publications and the tweets of people on the political left, usually the younger ones.

And if you have kids in French schools, don’t expect them to be learning it – the teaching of inclusive writing was banned by the former Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer in 2021.

“In the context of education, compliance with grammatical and syntactic rules is essential,” Blanquer wrote in the circular published in the Bulletin officiel de l’éducation nationale

“Recourse to so-called ‘inclusive’ writing should be prohibited … which notably uses the median-point to simultaneously reveal the feminine and masculine forms of a word used in the masculine when it is used in a generic sense.”

He’s OK with admitting that women do certain jobs though, adding: “The choice of examples or statements in a teaching situation must respect equality between girls and boys, both through the feminisation of terms and through the fight against stereotypical representations.” 

Is this a new problem?

The row over sexism in French has raged for decades. It can trace its roots back more than a century to World War I, when women filled traditionally masculine working roles while the men were in the trenches.

They changed the language. Nouns referring to men-only professions quickly developed feminine versions. At least until the men came back from the front.

The issue was studiously ignored at government level until 1984, when the first of numerous studies to make French gender neutral and more inclusive began. But any proposals put forward were rejected out of hand.

Playing catch-up

French-speakers in neighbouring Belgium and Switzerland dealt with this ages ago, while the official language body in French-speaking Canada urged language feminisation wherever possible in 1979. 

France is finally beginning to catch up with other Francophone nations. 

Today, feminine versions of the professions (surgeon – chirurgien or chirurgienne, solicitor – avocat or avocate, editor – rédacteur or rédactrice) are commonplace.

And it’s completely standard for politicians such as Emmanuel Macron to address françaises et français or, as below, female Europeans and male Europeans – although Charles de Gaulle also did this, so it’s not exactly a new development.

 

 

But it wasn’t until March 2019 that hoary old French language bastion the Académie Française waved the white flag allowing more feminine words for professions.

Until then, the official language of French life had been resolutely male, with most jobs titles automatically masculine (even if many people ignored the Academie’s views on this subject).

What about gender neutral terms?

For some, just adding feminine terms misses the point, but gender neutral pronouns in France are a very recent development.

Only in 2021 was the most common gender-neutral pronoun – ieladded to the dictionary.

The word iel – pronounced eee-ell – means him or her and is used in the same was as ‘they’ in English – either for when you don’t know the gender of the person you are talking about, or if the person prefers to go by a gender-neutral pronoun.

The French language has an additional problem for this, which is that adjectives must agree – so either il est gentil (he is kind) or elle est gentille (she is kind).

When using iel, the dictionary Le Petit Robert suggests either using inclusive writing;

iel est gentil·le – they are kind  

Or picking adjectives that do not change according to the gender ie iel est aimable – they are likeable – or the slightly more slangy iel est sympa – they’re nice.

Member comments

  1. Surely you mean “substitute the word ‘firefighter’ for ‘fireman'”.

    It’s nothing to do with sexism, or being old-fashioned: using “they” for “he” or “she” is just obscurantist virtue-signalling. Fortunately the French are too sensible for the time being.

  2. Perhaps people like Blanquer should realise that language is a living entity and is always changing but people people with a blinkered attitude like his are not helping a country but are holding it back.

  3. Surely large parts of French society will continue to simply ignore Blanquer’s edict, which seems to only concern the how to teach schoolchildren. I am a graduate student at Sorbonne University, and see this kind of gender-inclusive writing a lot. It definitely slowed me down as a reader, as I had not seen it before. I suspect that in 10 years, it will be more mainstream to use gender-inclusive nouns and we’ll wonder what all the fuss was about.

  4. This is patently ridiculous. It will NOT stop w/comédien vs comédienne. For example, here in the USA, the people acquiesced early, and now we have replaced breastfeeding with w/’chestfeeding’, your mom is now the ‘delivery person,’ and tampons are offered in the boys’ bathrooms and lockers. Not to mention over 64 (sixty-four) sex classifications have been identified such as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning, intersex, and asexual, (LGBTQIA) + 56 others. Of course, they will ALL need their own pronouns and articles. Oh, The Republic is about 30% of 275M French-speakers worldwide. Good luck convincing the other 70%.

    Mon avis? Arrête les conneries, personne ne s’en soucie!

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For members

ELECTIONS

10 essential French phrases to help you understand France’s snap election

Here are some of the words and phrases that you're likely to hear during the campaign for upcoming parliamentary elections in France.

10 essential French phrases to help you understand France's snap election

France heads to the polls at the end of the month, after President Emmanuel Macron called a snap election following a humiliating loss in the recent European vote.

If you’re either following French media or talking talking with your French friends, colleagues or neighbours then here are a few handy phrases to understand.

READ ALSO What would a victory for Le Pen’s party mean for France?

Législatives – these elections are parliamentary elections, where the voters are picking their local representative in the Assemblée nationale and therefore determining the make-up of the French parliament. They are known in French as les élections législatives or more commonly simply les législatives (pronounced roughly as lej-is-la-teev).

They are distinct from un élection présidentielle, which elects the president.

Scrutin – Scrutin, pronounced scroo-tan, is a word used to describe the vote. Le jour du scrutin = the day of the vote. 

Sondage – Sondage, pronounced son-darjh, is an opinion poll. 

They are frequently used in French media coverage of elections and provide a guide as to which issues are important for voters and which candidates are the most popular. 

As is always the case, however, they should be taken with a pinch of salt. Experts note that a number of variables can influence the result of a poll, including timing, phrasing, whether it is conducted online or in-person and the make-up of the sample. 

READ ALSO Who can vote in France’s snap parliamentary elections?

Aux urnes – Classic history rears its head every time there’s an election in France, with this snappy, headline-friendly term that dates back to antiquity.

Aux urnes – pronounced ohz urns – is the act of voting itself, and references the ancient Greek manner of voting, in which light or dark-coloured pebbles were placed into an urn to indicate a voter’s intentions. It basically means ‘to the ballot box’, but because its phrasing echoes the French national anthem’s famous line of Aux armes citoyens it’s used as a rallying call for people to vote.

Taux de participation – Taux de participation, pronounced toe de parti sipass-ion, literally means ‘rate of participation’. 

In an electoral context, this is used to describe the voter turnout – the percentage of the voting age population who cast their vote during an election. 

READ ALSO A voté: How to register and cast your vote in France

Voter turnout tends to be significantly lower in legislative, municipal and EU parliament elections in France – June’s European elections, the result of which in France prompted Macron to call the snap parliamentary poll, saw a turnout of 51.49 percent, one-and-a-half points higher than in 2019.

The opposite of a taux de participation is a taux d’abstentiontoe dab-stenss-ion – abstention rate. 

Premier tour/ deuxieme tour – As in presidential elections in French parliamentary elections, there are two rounds of voting. These rounds are referred to as tours, pronounced tore

In the first round (June 30th) the electorate can cast their vote for any of the official candidates.  

If any of these candidates win an absolute majority in the first round of the election (more than 50 percent of the vote) then there is no need for a second round. If no-one gets 50 percent, the top-scoring candidates from this first round then face off in a second round (July 7th), with the highest scoring candidate winning.

In presidential elections only the two highest scorers from round one go through to round two. However in parliamentary elections anyone who got more than 12.5 percent of the vote goes through to the second round – so second rounds can be a three or even four-person run-off.

Dissolution – Britons in France, cast your mind back to history lessons in school, and Henry VIII’s ‘dissolution of the monasteries’, and you’ll be on the right sort of lines. In 21st-century French political terms ‘dissolution’ – pronounced diss-o-loose-eon – means winding up, or termination of the current parliament to prepare for the election.

READ ALSO Macron dissolves parliament and calls elections after big EU vote defeat

Front republicain – The concept of a ‘Front republicain’ – pronounced front re-publee-cahn – is far from new. It’s the idea that, when necessary, France’s mainstream parties put aside their differences in order to combat extremists, particularly those among the far-right movement.

It has been seen in the second round of the presidential elections of 2017 and 2022, when the final candidates were far-right leader Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron – and in that context plenty of people who detest Macron and all that he stands for cast their vote for him because they considered the alternative, a far-right president of France, was much worse.

For these parliamentary elections, the Front Républicain is more to do with political parties and essentially involves parties making agreements not to run candidates against each other in certain constituencies, to avoid splitting the vote and allowing in  a Rassemblement National candidate.

It’s sometimes also known as a Front populaire.

READ ALSO What happens next as France heads for snap elections?

Pari fou – This is not a standard election phrase, admittedly. Pari fou – pronounced, pretty much as it’s written, parry foo – means crazy bet. 

It has been used to describe Macron’s decision to go to the polls – and it has the advantage of being short and snappy, so newspaper subs love it because it makes for a punchy headline.

Barrage – Another non-standard French electioneering term. A barrage – pronounced bah-rarjh – is a dam.

In today’s politics, it is being used to describe efforts to block the electoral path to power for the far-right parties. As in the headline: Emmanuel Macron appelle les électeurs à se rendre aux urnes pour faire barrage à l’extrême droiteEmmanuel Macron calls on voters to go to the polls to block the far right.

READ ALSO Macron asks backing from all ‘able to say no to extremes’ in snap vote

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