French politicians have accused one of the country’s leading dictionaries of “woke ideology” after it added the non-binary pronoun iel to its online edition.
Le Petit Robert’s definition of iel says the word can be “used to refer to a person of any gender”, replacing il or elle, the personal pronouns which have traditionally been used to refer to masculine and feminine genders in the French language.
The new word’s plural form, iels, can likewise be used in place of ils or elles.
While a number of other words such as vaccinodrome (vaccination centre) and antivax (abbreviation of antivaccin, which means anti-vaccination) were also added by the dictionary at the same time, only iel and its related words have attracted the ire of French traditionalists.
In a letter to the Académie Française - the country’s leading authority on the French language - François Jolivet, a member of Emmanuel Macron’s La République En Marche party, referred to the introduction of the word as “the advent of woke ideology, the destroyer of our values”.
“The solitary campaign of Le Petit Robert is an ideological intrusion, which undermines our common language,” Mr Jolivet wrote in the letter.
“This kind of initiative leads to a language soiled, which disunites its users instead of bringing them together,” Mr Jolivet added.
This prompted France’s Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer to tweet: “I obviously support the protest. Inclusive writing is not the future of the French language.”
“Even though our students are in the process of consolidating their fundamental knowledge, they cannot have this as a reference,” Mr Blanquer added.
But according to one expert, the issue in France is just an example of “gender politics”.
Dictionaries are often a battleground between two groups, according to the former editor of The Macquarie Dictionary Sue Butler.
“There’s the normal group of language conservatives - people who don’t like change in any aspect of their lives; who dig their heels in on language changes. They’re the ones who find the new words confronting because they themselves don’t use them,” Ms Butler told SBS News.
“And then there’s the group who loves changes and finds it all very exciting and different.”
But according to Ms Butler, the uproar in France is not just a debate between the traditionalists and the modernists.
“It’s gender politics and cultural change that makes that particular word sensitive,” Ms Butler said, adding Australia had to go through its own share of gender politics in the 1980s.
“That’s when we had a strong movement for gender-neutral pronouns and forms of address. For example, ‘Ms’ was introduced at that point, so that you didn’t have to decide whether a woman was a Mrs or a Miss.
“That had its problem, too, because a woman who at that stage was Mrs could easily have taken offence to being introduced as ‘Ms’.”
The introduction of the word “they” as a gender-neutral pronoun in The Macquarie Dictionary was comparatively smooth, Ms Butler said.
“The advantage for English is that ‘they’ had been used that way colloquially for quite some time, so it’s not as if we were inventing anything new. We were simply taking something that was already there and giving it a more formal status.
“Whereas in the case of the French, they’re actually inventing something,” Ms Butler said, referring to the new gender-neutral pronoun iel.
“And for most people, it’s harder to take something that seems contrived. It takes a bit longer, perhaps, for people to accept that.”
In a statement on Wednesday, Le Petit Robert director Charles Bimbenet said dictionaries include many words that reflect ideas or trends without themselves subscribing to these ideas, and that since the word iel is used more and more, it is useful to include a description.
"The Robert's mission is to observe the evolution of a diverse French language as it evolves and to report on it. Defining the words that speak of the world is to help understand it better," Mr Bimbenet added.
Valentina Gosetti, senior lecturer in French at the University of New England, supported the addition of the new gender-neutral words.
"Those who have criticised this move do not fully understand that the role of a dictionary is not to prescribe what should or should not be said but, rather, to describe, to capture as accurately as possible the ever-evolving use of a given language by its users," Ms Gosetti told SBS News.
"If a word exists and it is used by speakers, it should appear in the dictionary, people should be able to look it up and to understand its uses and, if they so wish, start using it."
"A dictionary's mission is not to judge what should or should not be used, rather, as rightly claimed by Le Robert's editors, it is to 'observe the evolution of a French language in motion and to report on it'."
Additional reporting by Reuters
