Language is political. Where you stand in the debate over whether the refusal of some people to use gender-neutral pronouns constitutes hate speech is ultimately a statement of your politics.
There is nothing novel or modern about this debate. Imposing one form of language over another once only came after bloody conquest. In more recent times, those who hold power often seek to impose the language they need to maintain their grip on it.
That is why the current debate in France over the feminization of the French-language and the use of "inclusive writing" is about so much more than just adding an odd "e" here or an odd accent there to end the anachronism, or insult, of female professionals holding masculine titles.
As in Madame le président or Madame le maire, instead of Madame la présidente or Madame la maire. Or, in the case of Hélène Carrère d'Encausse, le secrétaire perpétuel of the Académie française, the très conservative guardian of the French language that has resisted not only the feminization of titles, but much more controversial grammatical changes that would end 350 years or more of the masculine trumping the feminine in all matters linguistic.
France is three decades or more behind Quebec in this regard. The feminization of titles has been the norm in la belle province since the early 1990s, when the Office québécois de la langue française adopted guidelines that have been almost universally embraced by francophones on this side of the Atlantic. Hence, in 2012, Pauline Marois could become Quebec's first female premier without any debate about what to call her. She was simply la première ministre.
Similarly, nobody hesitated calling Valérie Plante la mairesse when she was sworn in as Montreal's first elected female mayor this month. But her Parisian counterpart, Anne Hidalgo, generated a polemic when she requested to be called la maire after becoming the city's first female chief magistrate in 2014. If most media eventually conceded, the Académie française refused to give in.
The same year, the Académie issued a clarification of its position, saying the feminization of titles, "sometimes against the wishes" of the women who hold them, had made "veritable barbarisms" of proper French words. That was until last week, when the Académie finally budged and agreed to review its rules on feminization "by the end of the year."
That amounts to lightspeed for a nearly 400-year-old institution that usually takes decades to deliberate over modifications to the French language. But if the Académie, whose 34 members include Haitian-born Quebec writer Dany Laferrière, suddenly appears sensitive to public opinion, it may be because it has already been losing the battle over feminization in France.
To maintain its relevance, it will need to get with the times. That means offering more than a dismissive sneer whenever legitimate questions are raised about the outdated nature of French grammar, as it did last month on learning that a new school manual had broken the sacrosanct rule that "the masculine takes precedence over the feminine." That rule has been grilled into students' heads since the adoption of standardized French in the 17th century. But an increasing number of teachers are starting to rebel, including more than 300 who signed a manifesto this month saying they would no longer teach this rule in class.
In official French, it suffices for one male nurse to join a group of 99 female nurses in order for the whole lot of them to be called infirmiers instead of infirmières. "It's obviously scandalous," linguist Alain Rey told Le Monde last week. Insisting on the masculine form in such cases "is clearly anti-feminist."
You might be surprised how many French purists disagree, including Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer. He has not only rejected the use of inclusive writing in school manuals, but last week insisted that France "has always been at the forefront of feminism." That assertion in itself set off a supplementary debate to the linguistic one in France, where women only got the right to vote in 1944.
Prime Minister Édouard Philippe didn't help matters by last week issuing a diktat banning the use of inclusive language in official government documents and communications. "Besides a respect for the formalism specific to acts of a legal nature," he said, "administrations falling under state authority must conform to grammatical and syntactical rules, particularly for reasons of intelligibility and clarity."
For Quebec francophones, who have long followed the linguistic ruminating of their French cousins with bemusement, it all seems so passé.
Konrad Yakabuski