French President Emmanuel Macron looked to cement his legacy, and take on political opponents, with the inauguration on Monday of a monument to the French language deep in far-right heartland.
Macron used the occasion to wade into a culture war debate, backing a right-wing bill to ban the use of “inclusive language” – a popular trend for using both masculine and feminine versions of words when writing.
France must “not give in to fashionable trends,” he said as he inaugurated the Cite Internationale de la Langue Francaise just hours before the Senate was due to debate the proposed law.
Modern French presidents love a cultural “grand projet” – an imposing monument to “scratch” their name on history, as ex-leader Francois Mitterrand put it in the 1980s.
Mitterrand was an avid and controversial legacy-builder, transforming the Louvre museum with a glass pyramid, and erecting the vast Opera Bastille and National Library.
Georges Pompidou built a famous modern art museum in Paris, and Jacques Chirac created the Quai Branly global culture museum on the banks of the Seine.
The practice fell out of fashion this century, but has been revived by Macron, who was already eyeing up a crumbling chateau in the small town of Villers-Cotterets while still a presidential candidate in 2017.
He has overseen the renovation of the Renaissance castle, completed in 1539 under King Francois I, and its transformation into an international centre for the French language.
It hopes to attract 200,000 visitors a year to its large library (replete with AI-supported suggestion engine), interactive exhibits and cultural events.
Perhaps fittingly, the website seems determinedly uninterested in the quality of its English translations, describing the castle as a “high place of the French history and architecture”.
That’s still causing the issue of “man as the default,” now it’s just “we consider women men too.” The more logical way would be to use language akin to “firefighter,” “officer,” or “pig,” all naturally neutral words.
Latin derived languages can’t simply use “words like officer, firefighter” to solve the problem because all nouns are gendered, including those not related to living beings at all. You could create a gender-neutral title, but it would still be masculine or feminine in a sentence.
Yeah, well, “they” was exclusively a plural pronoun in English until some people started using it in the singular as a gender-neutral pronoun, and everyone eventually got over it. Well, most everyone.
Languages evolve. I realize this example isn’t as complicated as what is required for using gender-inclusive language in a romance language, but my point remains valid.
“They” as a gender neutral singular pronoun is not a new phenomenon.
But you’re still not understanding my point - I’m not saying people can’t adapt or that language never changes. I’m talking about how the entire grammatical structure of a sentence in Latin languages will force a gender - there’s no way to avoid it. You’d have to modify pretty much all classes of words in order to achieve gender neutrality (apart from masculine neutral) and even then, it would have some irregular ambiguities. This type of change doesn’t happen - you can’t wave your prescriptivism wand and suddenly make everyone change 80% of the words on their vocabulary.
Different language, but I’ve seen some interesting experimental Latine gender neutral verbage. Instead of a/o they just use e.
It definitely requires a fundamental change to language, though, and I don’t know if it can ever take off. Maybe as its own dialect?
It absolutely can be integrated into the language, it will just sound “weird” for a bit, as it’s taking advantage of an underused, but already existing, part of the language.
You’re right, it can happen but I think it would require some central authority to decree that the language is now gender neutral and then use it exclusively in schools and public communication. Changing a language is hard.
EDIT Oh boo hoo you fuckin liberals, you don’t want to admit that we need central control of fucking anything and want to pretend language will just magically get better on its own.
We’re still struggling with slurs and that’s just a few words used in a few contexts. You fucking think you can restructure grammatical gender without state intervention? Grow up.
At the very least it would require all the state schools and publications changing, if not forcing it onto mass media on general.
That’s what we need. Stop being cowards.
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