A French dictionary adding gender-neutral pronouns to its online edition prompted backlash from lawmakers opposed to incorporating “woke” ideology into the language.
Le Petit Robert, a popular dictionary, added the pronoun “iel” as a gender-neutral way of referring to a person, combining the feminine “elle” with the masculine “il.” Members of the French Parliament slammed the move, including a member of President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist party who penned a letter to the Academie Francaise, a council that regulates the French language, calling the change a “manifest ideological intrusion.”
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“The solitary campaign of Petit Robert is a manifest ideological intrusion which undermines our common language. … This kind of initiative tarnishes our language and divides users rather than uniting them,” MP Francois Jolivet wrote in the letter, which he posted on Twitter.
Jolivet called the authors of Le Petit Robert “militants of a cause that has nothing French about it: #wokism” in the caption.
Minister of Education Jean-Michel Blanquer endorsed Jolivet’s letter, tweeting, “Inclusive writing is not the future of the French language.”
The dictionary said it added the term because it is growing in popularity.
“The Robert’s mission is to observe the evolution of a diverse French language as it evolves and to report on it,” Le Robert director Charles Bimbenet said, according to multiple outlets. “Defining the words that speak of the world is to help understand it better.”
Despite the backlash, some applauded the dictionary’s decision.
“It is very important that dictionaries include the ‘iel’ pronoun in their referencing as it reflects how the use of the term is now well accepted,” Dorah Simon Claude, a doctoral student who uses the pronoun, told the Associated Press. “It is also a way of confronting the Academie Francaise that stays in its conservative corner and continues to ignore and scorn users of the French language.”
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The adoption of progressive language such as gender-neutral pronouns faces more hurdles in languages that are inherently gendered such as French, using masculine or feminine cases to refer to most nouns. German officials reprimanded universities in September for attempting to enforce gender-neutral language among students and faculty, and the Christian Social Union, a conservative Bavarian party, voted to condemn such policies as “politically indoctrinating, artificial excesses of gender-moralising language acrobatics.”
