Ils versus ielles: the battle over the French language

Emmanuel Macron is "a great lover" of traditional French, the language of Molière, said Die Welt (Berlin). 

He often sprinkles his conversation with quaint terms like croquignolesque (ridiculous) or gallimatias (confused chatter). So it was entirely fitting that last week he should have been at Villers-Cotterêts castle, the royal hunting lodge where King Francis I signed an "Ordinance" in 1539 making French the nation's official language in place of Latin. 

The president was there to inaugurate the most expensive cultural project of his term in office (aside from the restoration of Notre-Dame): a museum dedicated to the French language. The Cité internationale de la langue française, located in the newly renovated castle and costing €210m, will next year hold a summit aiming to unite every corner of the vast French-speaking world to mainland France.

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'A gendered language'

But what no one had anticipated, said Marie Le Conte in The New European (London), was that Macron would use the occasion to wade into the ongoing culture war about making French more "inclusive". French is a gendered language, so if men and women do anything together they become ils (masculine) not elles (feminine). This and countless other linguistic sidelinings of the female have led feminists to demand a reshaping of French in official documents – ils to become ielles, for example, and sénateurs to become sénateur.rice.s. However, in the senate, the French parliament's largely conservative upper house, those self-same sénateur.rice.s, deeply opposed to such gender inclusive terms, have voted in favour of a bill banning their use in job adverts, official regulations and other government documents.

And Macron has backed them, said Julie Neveux in Libération (Paris). "We shouldn't give in to the zeitgeist", he insisted in his speech: in French "the masculine is neutral" and doesn't need to be altered. Really, Mr President? When someone says, in French, "the surgeons have entered the room", the masculine ending makes you inevitably think they're men. It needs changing.

'Rash of inclusive writing'

Global warming, turmoil in the Middle East: it seems odd for our politicians to be making French vocabulary their priority, said Samuel Petit in Le Télégramme (Morlaix). Still, they have a point. The rash of inclusive writing in official communiqués is like "chickenpox on the faces of young children": it scars public discourse. Our language is beautiful and we should respect it.

Let's not kid ourselves, said Roman Bucheli in Neue Zürcher Zeitung (Zurich): Macron's intervention was a ploy. He knows the bill is unlikely to be enacted: he's just seeking applause from the Right. It's hard to deny that the linguistic novelties proposed by activists often border on the ridiculous, said Christophe Lucet in Sud Ouest (Bordeaux). But the shape a language takes is governed by those who speak it, not by campaigners or the state. Fear not; French as we know it will endure.