“Personal pronoun of the third person singular and plural, used to refer to a person regardless of gender.” This is the definition of the French “iel”, equivalent to our “elle” (there is the combination between “il” and “elle”) that can be found since yesterday in the online version of the French dictionary Le petit Robert, the most popular of France. It is the first time that no reference manual for the Gallic language includes the pronoun “inclusive”. And the answers have not been long in coming.
Je soutiens evidenced the protest of @ FJolivet36 vis-à-vis du #PetitRobert
L’écriture inclusive n’est pas l’avenir de la langue française.
Alors même que nos elèves sont justement en train de consolider leurs savoirs fondamentaux, ils ne sauraient avoir cela pour référence: https://t.co/09thJzQ7iN– Jean-Michel Blanquer (@jmblanquer) November 16, 2021
“It is not the future of the French language”: This has been the response of the Minister of Education, Jean-Michel Blanquer, backing a formal request from the parliamentarian François Jolivet, representative of La République En Marche! (French liberal and centrist party), which has asked the Académie Française to intervene in the matter and demand that the dictionary remove its entry. The minister’s comment continued: “our students, those who are consolidating their basic knowledge, should not have it [el pronombre] as reference”. Jolivet went a little further: he stated that he thought that Le petit Robert was a “reference dictionary”, but that, by integrating “iel, ielle, iels, ielles” a space full of “militants of a cause that there is nothing French about it: #wokism ”.
Wokism? The mockery on the part of the critics did not wait. The word used by the centrist parliamentarian, wokism, refers to the so-called “woke” ideology, imported from the United States, referring to a critique of class, race and gender progressivism and, most importantly, an Anglicism that is not recognized in French dictionaries. With joke, the Le petit Robert have announced that they promise to “include it soon” in their manuals.
The evolution of the language. Charles Bimbenet, the managing director of this reference work, has said that “Robert’s mission is to observe and report on the evolution of a changing and diverse French language.” He acknowledges that the use of “iel” is currently still “relatively weak “, but that their librarians found more and more inquiries about the term in recent months, which is why they decided to include it. In essence, their job is not to restrain (or promote) the advance of certain words, but to define them if They are already present on a daily basis to help us understand them better.In the same way that French voters understood what Jolivet meant by “wokism”, it is useless to silence that Gallic “elle” that some use.
Anti-Americanism. To the linguistic conservatism typical of its academies as well as those of many other neighboring countries, Spain among them, “iel” finds in France another added angle of rejection: that of being considered an imperialist ideology. The critics of the word consider that a sector of the population, especially young people, university students and leftists, is embracing the American importation of ideas and debates that should not be held within the Republic. The principles of egalité, fraternité and liberté, which would already include both the ideals of the Constitution and the daily practice of its institutions, would be opposed by the segregation of identities promulgated by the United States, which only leads to confrontation between groups instead of a conflict. communion in one town.
A living war: A few months ago we told how, after several progressive initiatives to modify the language, the current French government struck a blow against inclusive language: it prohibited its use in schools and in official texts and records. In this case the focus of attention was the masculinization of the language: for example, to refer to “the French and the French women”, many had been writing “français · es”, including both forms. From now on you could only say “the French”. French is also a language in which the gender segregation of the professions is especially accentuated: there are no female surgeons, writers or presidents, but rather they should be called “surgeon”, “writer” and “president”, something that even the Académie Française itself has denounced it as undesirable. Blanquer settled the debate by impeding progress and calling inclusive language “an obstacle to understanding writing.”
Trans joy: Lee Ferrero, from the Transat foundation in Marseille, has been “in favor of this kind of” officialization of the term “of” iel “:” It is almost something historical. Language is the foundation of the existence of things, so imagine a situation in which your identity is not expressible, a situation in which you cannot communicate easily and be understood when you speak ”.