Non le masculin ne l’emporte pas sur le féminin!
Oh, interesting. The Académie Française dit “non” to gender inclusive language.
The Académie Française, France’s ultimate authority on the French language, is under fierce attack for describing gender-neutral text as an “aberration” that puts the language in “mortal danger”.
The “Immortals”, as the 40 academy members – only five of whom are women – are known, have sparked a national row after declaring that “inclusive writing” has no place in the country’s grammar books, or anywhere else for that matter.
The thing is, having an “ultimate authority” on a language is a highly dubious enterprise to begin with from a linguistic point of view. I hate the way people say “it negatively impacted her” instead of “it harmed her” but I don’t get to enforce it. (Except when I’m editing other people.)
In a statement full of hyperbole, the academy condemned the increasing use of new spellings aimed at making written French less masculine, arguing that it could not see the “desired objective” of the changes.
French grammatical rules give the masculine form of a noun precedence over the female. Women on an all-female board of company directors are called directrices; if one man joins the board, they are referred to collectively as directeurs.
I remember being taught in school that rule that says “ils” trumps “elles” no matter how many “elles” there are and how few “ils.” If there are a billion “elles” and one “il” it’s still “ils.” It was an all-girls school, and we were deeply annoyed.
We weren’t wrong. That’s a stupid rule, and yes of course it sends a message.
I also remember someone saying to me a few years ago, “Oh, you’re an authoress.” A what? No I’m not. This is why “actor” is replacing “actress” and “wait staff” replacing waiters and waitresses.
For years, French presidents have addressed citizens as les Français et les Françaises instead of the strictly correct les Français, but the recent row was sparked by a new textbook aimed at primary school children that employs the inclusive style, and came into use for the first time this year.
After a vote last month, the Académie Française issued a unanimous “non” to the new style, deeming it far too complicated.
“Faced with the aberration of ‘inclusive writing’, the French language finds itself in mortal danger,” its statement read.
…
Established by Louis XIII’s chief minister Cardinal Richelieu in 1635, outlawed after the French Revolution and restored by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1803, there have been a total of 726 members, only eight of whom have been women. The first, Belgian-born novelist Marguerite Yourcenar, was elected in 1980.
Speaking of language police, that first sentence is a mess – “established by” and “there have been” don’t go together. But that’s by the way.
In 2014, the academy opposed the feminisation of job titles, making Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo’s subsequent insistence on being called Madame la Maire (and not Madame le Maire) grammatically incorrect.
Eliane Viennot, professor of literature at Jean-Monnet University in St-Étienne and author of the book Non le masculin ne l’emporte pas sur le féminin! (No the masculine does not take precedence over the feminine!), said: “They [the academy] are extremely conservative.”
“If you ask people to list their favourite écrivains (writers) they will only mention male authors,” Viennot told France24 television. “It’s not until you ask them to list their favourite écrivainsand écrivaines that they think of women.”
In an opinion piece in Libération, she called for France to “pull the plug” on the academy.
“For 30 years they have never stopped trying to torpedo any evolution of the French language towards equality,” Viennot wrote.
I guess they prefer fraternity.
or any evolution of the French language tout court. I have always suspected that the Academie, both as an institution and the mindset it represents, are responsible for the sheer poverty of the French language which has maybe (if I am being generous) a vocabulary a third the size of English. There is a fixation on the purity of the language where one can easily detect fascistic undertones and which has prevented the assimilation of local words both from the different regions of France and from abroad. For the Academie the only correct version of French is the one that was spoken in the 17th Century in a tiny part of France.
So yeah, “for thirty years”? Its whole history is one of exclusion.
It’s interesting that French inclusivity tends to mean separate titles for male and female (even if only at the level of the article, sometimes, as in le/la Maire), whereas English inclusivity tends to mean abolishing such separate titles and having one title become universal.
It’s down to French having gendered nouns, and those genders being naively mapped onto human genders. That’s a mistake, though a natural one. Hopefully French can eventually divorce the genders of its nouns from the genders of its people.
Seth @2
Members of the Academy could also take the ‘Anglo Saxon’ approach and (1) abolish grammatical gender and all those ridiculous inflexions and (2) mind their own business.
Interestingly, the woman who may become the next mayor of Montreal this Sunday, seems to prefer “mairesse”. Old habits?
http://www.projetmontreal.org/splash-fr?splash=1
I also remember someone saying to me a few years ago, “Oh, you’re an authoress.” A what? No I’m not. This is why “actor” is replacing “actress” and “wait staff” replacing waiters and waitresses.
I agree with most of this post, but this is one issue that I find rather strange. I understand that the effort in English is to call women ‘actor’ or ‘steward’ just like men, so as not to differentiate and not to single out one gender as something unusual in the profession. On the other hand, in my native language, German, it has traditionally been the case that the male form was used for the entire profession, and around the time I was a teenager there was a strong push towards recognising both genders, with everybody on the left trying out different ways of doing so efficiently. Instead of writing Schauspieler (actors) one would now be expected to write Schauspieler und Schauspielerinnen (actors and actresses), which is a handful, and then SchauspielerInnen or perhaps Schauspieler/innen (actorEsses, actor/esses) as more concise forms.
So in both languages there was a move towards changing the current practice (whatever it was) to its opposite (whatever that was), in the hope that it would reduce sexism in people’s thinking by reducing sexism in the language. But weirdly, English went from A to B (erasing the female form to treat everybody the same) while German went from B to A (always mentioning the female form to be inclusive), with the exact same justification and aim. What I unfortunately cannot help but take away from this is that language does not matter as much as some of us would like to believe, and that the fight for changing the terminology may have been more of a distraction when time would have been better spent campaigning for more material forms of progress such as equal pay, quotas in parliament, incentives for men to share childrearing work, etc.
Just my two cents, while admitting that as a man I have less on the line here than a woman.
I think the difference is that since English does not have grammatical gender, a word like “actress” or “authoress” is the odd one out, implying that gender is important for some reason. A word like “actor” or “driver” or “pilot” is not intrinsically male in English; it only becomes so when you introduce an explicit female form of the word. So getting rid of “actress” and “waitress” (not to mention abominations like “authoress” and “lawyeress”) doesn’t feel like erasing a female form, so much as discarding a senseless distinction.
Of course, when children are asked to draw a scientist, for instance, they still tend overwhelmingly to draw a man, so just because we have an ungendered word doesn’t mean our internal representation of the concept is ungendered. I’m not sure that’s a reason not to try, though.
Maybe it is just my background (incl. German as native language and Latin as the third one I learned at school), but words ending in -or and -er do sound intrinsically male to me.
Regarding your second paragraph, the point I wanted to make is that I do not believe that any kind of language acrobatics will make those children draw 50% female scientists; but having >40% women in STEM will automatically change their assumptions even if the language uses male-only terms for those scientists. They will not think of random generic scientist, they will think of the ones they have seen interviewed on TV or suchlike.
Now I will freely admit that I cannot 100% know that that is how it works as in having data from a double blind experiment, but as far as I can tell language is pretty fluid, changing to adopt to a changing reality, but trying to reshape reality by using different terminology is pretty much, if we come right down to it, one of the definitions of magical thinking.
@AlexSL
I think periastron is right: If you wanted to use “Schauspieler” for both genders in German, the article would immediately counteract your intention – “der Schauspieler” is clearly perceived to be male. (There are some interesting experiments by Gygax et al. to see how the German “generic masculinum” is actually perceived.)
On top of that, in English you can use “they” as singular pronoun to refer to a person of unspecified gender; there is no such word in German.
Sonderval,
As I am German, I am fully aware of how our grammar works. That does still not mean that the mental image that is produced will fit the grammatical gender; when somebody says Grundschullehrer, for example, I would strongly presume that despite the male grammatical gender most people would visualise a woman, because most primary school teachers are women. Conversely, English speakers could have argued that actor is the male form, actress is the female form, so one should say “actresses and actors”. That they did not do so was not because it was written on golden tablets handed down from the sky.
@AlexSL
That is exactly what Gygax et al investigated. Your presumption is not what the evidence shows – even with jobs that are strongly stereotyped as women’s job, the “generic masculinum” lets people assume that a male person is meant, whereas english-speaking people are mainly led by the stereotype.
I wrote about this (in German) here (and in other places on my blog):
http://scienceblogs.de/hier-wohnen-drachen/2012/05/11/gibt-es-ein-generisches-maskulinum/?all=1
PS
Concerning the english language, there was a tendency at the end of the 70s, beginning of the 80s to use both forms, but this was replaced by the alternative. There was an article about this by Hofstadter where he strongly argued against using both forms and only using on neutral form. (BTW, Hofstadters paper “on purity in language” is very good.)
I will have a look at Gygax et al then, thanks for that suggestion. It may take quite a bit of evidence though to convince me that changing the language will actually lead to significant outcomes in the sense of e.g. higher representation of women compared to not having changed the language, or that a very egalitarian society with very gendered language is impossible, given that we use a lot of very inaccurate without even noticing it. (Hardly anybody who says “the sun rises” is a geocentrist, for example, so I don’t see why somebody who says “der Wissenschaftler” or “the actress” should automatically be more sexist than somebody who doesn’t, all else being equal. The point is not to have people say “the earth turns so that the sun comes into view” but instead to teach them heliocentrism.)
@AlexSL
I do understand that – but there is lots of evidence that the “generic masculinum” leads to people automatically thinking only of male people. When you ask people to name their favorite “Schauspieler”, you get a lot more male names than when you ask for their favorite “Schauspielerin or Schauspieler”. There are a large number of studies showing effects like this.
Alex SL @ 7 –
Gosh, really? Writer, gardener, server, dishwasher, teacher, designer? Those all sound intrinsically male to you? In a way that, say, judge or surgeon or admiral don’t? And it’s because of the -er and not because of stereotypes? Are you sure?
What I unfortunately cannot help but take away from this is that language does not matter as much as some of us would like to believe, and that the fight for changing the terminology may have been more of a distraction when time would have been better spent campaigning for more material forms of progress such as equal pay, quotas in parliament, incentives for men to share childrearing work, etc.
Yeah, as though toying with gendered pronouns will bring about equality.
French assigns genders to older objects, but since the 20th century many newfangled inventions enjoy a more gender neutral status.
One can say ‘le radio’ ou ‘la radio’ tandis qu’une chaise reste UNE chaise. All languages are in constant evolution and always reflect the current condition/situations in a myriad of ways. Re-engineering them wholesale in an effort to satisfy various ideological *brain-farts* is fascistic and authoritarian; it’s the purvey of Bolsheviks and Nazis.
…Cardinal Richelieu being Exhibit ‘A’ here.
Interestingly, the woman who may become the next mayor of Montreal this Sunday, seems to prefer “mairesse”. Old habit
Perhaps she does so only to underline the fact that, if successful, she WILL be the city’s first female mayor…..I don’t know.
Off on a tangent as usual:
An anecdote tells of a mason called in to fix the fireplace at a colonel’s home. One of the maids comes in and says: “Överstinnan (the colonel’s wife) lets it be known that there will be coffee in the kitchen when you are done.”
Responds the mason: “Let it be known that is not necessary, since murarinnan (the mason’s wife) packed me a thermos.”
@Ophelia#14
It’s the same for me – in German “-er” is an ending that you find on words that are grammatically masculine.
Thanks, John – your breezy contempt is always refreshing.
One interesting note on this: I have had my freshman students do this exercise i.e. drawing a scientist. In spite of the fact that they are in a science class being taught by a woman scientist currently asking them to draw a scientist, I have never, ever had a single student draw a female scientist. And there is almost always wild hair, a lab coat, glasses, and beakers. So scientists apparently are also all mad scientists (or Einstein) and chemists.
I did the same experiment to being my thesis defense in my MFA, since I did my thesis on how science was presented on stage. Again, the room was aware that the individual (weird though she might be) was not just a playwright but a scientist, I got the same result. The only difference is that in this group, many people were chagrined when they realized what they had done by the end of my talk.
Ophelia,
Yes, as Sonderval says, -er is generally male in German, and -or is male in Latin, with rare exceptions such as that trees are nearly always considered to be female. Note that this is about grammatical gender, which is distinct from the actual gender of a thing or of a group of people, which is my whole point. To name a very obvious case, “das Mädchen” (the girl) is neuter, but the mental image that is produced in Germans when you say that word is nonetheless that of a female human.
So that travels to English? I guess that makes sense.
Sorry if I have been confused in my writing, but I merely meant how it sounds to me given my background. I assume an American today should not be able to say that e.g. ‘actor’ sounds intrinsically male.
Oh, no, your writing is very clear. I just misunderstood, or rather, stupidly failed to grasp that you meant such words sounded intrinsically male because in German they are.
In Korea, one way of politely referring to a person, like calling someone “Mr. 1152”, would be to add “씨” to the end of their name. “씨” is pronounced like “she”.
So in Korea, whether you consider yourself a Mr. Benson, Mrs. Benson or Ms. Benson, the translations would all be the same. 밴선씨 (“Benson-she”).
How important is that? Does that simplicity and egalitarian naming convention get expressed in other ways?
Check out the gender wage gap chart you can pull up on this page: https://data.oecd.org/earnwage/gender-wage-gap.htm
The United States is at 18.1. So is Finland. Korea an outlier, with the highest gender wage gap (36.7).
And France? The gender wage gap in France is 9.9. One of the lowest gender wage gaps in the OECD.
Hmm. I was just reading Monty Python sketches when the “ding” announced a new e-mail.
Take that for “something completely different”! Gender-numeral too.
John at #15 :
Non.
@Sonderval #11
Recalling the move towards gender-neutral language in the 70s-80s, I still recall a news report from the early 80s in which the leadership of a committee was referred to as “the chairman and the vice-chairperson”
Ha!