The Académie Française
When I spent a year as the George Bennett Fellow at Phillips Exeter Academy in 1979-80, my title was the subject of innumerable ribald comments. Was I the fellowess or the fellowette? I suspect that this year’s GB Fellow no longer contends with these unfunny jokes. Our usage has shifted, over almost 40 years, such that fellow, in the sense I’m using it here, can apply equally to men or women. Ditto actor and shepherd; with other professional names, we’ve changed the appellation itself, hence server rather than waiter or waitress; mail carrier rather than postman. This is all old news. But now the French are onto it, and there lies a kerfuffle indeed.
Like dozens of other languages, French accords gender to all nouns; adjectives agree with the gender of the nouns they modify, as do pronouns with their antecedents. Thus it happened that an exchange student in my creative-writing class was enlightened to discover that her narrator was not identifiably male or female for the first two pages of her story. In French, her descriptions would have indicated the sex, e.g., I was a serious student would have read J’étais un étudiant sérieux or J’étais une étudiante sérieuse. At the same time, as the language advocates at the “agency of influential communication” Mots-Clés make clear, the push for “inclusive writing” in France is wrestling with inequality in a language where change faces a great deal of resistance.
No, they are not trying to rid French of gender markers, despite the Académie Française’s cry of alarm that with such proposed changes, “the French language will henceforth find itself in mortal peril.” Rather, they are trying to elevate (or, when necessary, invent) the feminine forms of all references to persons. To safeguard against the feminine form’s being seen as somehow accessory to the default masculine form, they propose listing references like elle and il in alphabetical order, but for the most part, the alternative endings (signaled by a “mi-point,” or dot between endings) tend to place the masculine first. Thus, for the sentence “The actors are beautiful, but those who sing look silly,” you would have:
Les acteur•rice•s sont beaux•elles, mais ceux•elles qui chantent semblent idiot•e•s.
Proponents of inclusive writing put forward other changes. The capitalized Homme, traditionally used to refer to humankind, should be replaced with la personne humaine. For professions, like writer (écrivain) or plumber (plombier) currently lacking a feminine form, one can be invented, (écrivaine, plombière). But I suspect it is the orthographical proposal that has most incensed the Académie. “The multiplicity of orthographic and syntactic marks that it induces,” write the defenders of French, “leads to a disunited language, disparate in its expression, creating confusion that borders on illegibility.”
Proponents have a response to this objection at the ready: “Many months of such usage,” they point out, “have shown us that the eye adjusts very quickly and that some of these automatic gestures were easily written.” We’ve seen this in English with the slash, which is spoken as well as written, e.g. “Dear Sir/Madam.” So, although the mi-pointed sentence above looks awfully clumsy to me, I suppose the language would adjust. The subject gets knottier, though, when it comes to keeping or designating feminine versions of nouns, especially job titles. We’ve been there, in English, and the French is markedly similar in that most female versions include a longer ending that can easily be seen as diminutive. The obsolete term comedienne, for instance, is literally the French female version of comedian, and I know no funny females who would opt for it. My caution comes with no other solution, because the convention that modifiers and pronouns accord with the subject’s gender more or less demands a subject that is either masculine or feminine. The neutrality available in English is simply unavailable where gender is knit into the very structure of the language.
I will note an irony that I suspect was intentional on the part of the autocratic Académie. In their adamant refusal even to consider inclusive writing, they refer to their own body, in all its power, as elle, since Académie is a feminine noun. Likewise, they make a point of using the terms langue, générations, and promesses, all of which are likewise feminine, as antecedents for feminine appositives and pronouns. “There, you see?” they might as well be saying. “The female has plenty of power in language already.”
That doesn’t solve the problem, of course. Aux barricades!