The Linguist

16 The Linguist Vol/64 No/2 ciol.org.uk/thelinguist FEATURES Is it possible to make French gender-neutral? Georgia Meakins explores the challenges and the politics Inclusive writing has swept across many languages in recent years as a direct result of the ever-diversifying debate surrounding gender equality and trans rights. In English, the pronoun 'they' has experienced a dramatic and permanent two-fold shift in usage. On the one hand, it has been adopted by the trans community for those who do not identify as either a man or a woman, as an alternative for gendered 'he/him' or 'she/her' pronouns. On the other hand, its use to refer to a person whose gender is unknown or irrelevant is also increasing to avoid the generic masculine, which has long received criticism from feminists. However, in other languages, the desire to neutralise gendered language is not so easily realised and the debate goes much deeper. Attempts to adapt such languages have shaken them to their foundations, leaving linguists to question where they stand when presented with a text for translation. When working with Romance languages such as French and Spanish, most nouns are gendered, and have traditionally been used in the masculine when referring to mixed-gender groups. However, many institutions, conscious of the growing aversion to the generic masculine, have incorporated 'inclusive writing', where a slash or point is used to include the feminine: Il/la serveu·r·se or El/la camarero/a, equivalent to 'the waiter/waitress'. While this practice is often shunned by linguistic authorities such as the Académie Française, its use is widespread, and translating with it is rarely a problem for linguists. However, while 'inclusive language' seeks to treat men and women equally, it isn't inclusive of everyone. It isn't neutral. How, in a heavily gendered language such as French, could one express non-binarity? Neutral language is easily achieved in English: 'waiter/waitress' becomes simply 'server' or even 'Front of House staff'. Meanwhile, in recent decades, Spanish has seen a rise of alternative endings, such as -e, -x or -i rather than the gendered 'o' for male and 'a' for female (with -e being the most common in my experience). So camarero/ camarera becomes camarere, and Latina/Latino becomes Latinx. Generally, inclusive Spanish speakers quickly get used to these alternative endings. A bigger challenge with creating neutral endings comes from French. Thanks to the work of feminist activists such as Élianne Viennot, inclusive writing that uses middle dots to include the feminine ending is commonplace (much to the chagrin of the Académie). However, many feel that it can complicate reading when there are many dots (les rédact·eur·ice·s français·es) and end up having the opposite effect in being completely ignored. This, coupled with the lack of trans inclusivity, has led to the advent of langage neutre – neutral language – particularly among young French-speaking trans communities on the internet. This revolutionary concept aims to reconstruct the French language around the goal of creating a neutral form of many nouns and grammatical markers. Starting with neopronouns, the most common is iel, a combination of il and elle, which could be considered equivalent to the English 'they'. A range of other neopronouns, such as ol, ul, ælle, al, ille and ael, are also in use. Best practice is to ask for an individual's pronouns rather than making an assumption. These pronouns represent the fluid, non- standardised nature of French's genre neutre, Gender evolution © CANVA

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