10 hours ago
Provence puts full stop to gender-neutral language
The front line in a French-language fight over gender equality has shifted south to Provence, with a ban by the conservative-led regional council on institutions using 'inclusive' speech.
In the build-up to the summer festival season, Renaud Muselier, president of Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur (Paca), the third-richest of France's 13 regions, has ordered public agencies to stop using terms adopted by the left and feminists in recent years that give equal importance to men, women and non-binary people.
The politically loaded system, mainly used only in written form and rejected by President Macron as clumsy and confusing, uses a 'median dot' to include masculine, feminine and plural forms when referring to people.
Traditionally, the masculine form prevails, as it does in most gendered European languages. Under the inclusive system, a group of male and female students becomes 'les étudiant·e·s' instead of 'les étudiants'.
The third person becomes a newly coined hybrid word, 'iel', instead of 'il' or 'elle', with 'iels' as a new neutral plural.
Job adverts for staff sometimes seek 'un·e collaborateur·trice·s' and businesses email their 'cher·e client·e·s' (dear customers). Germany, Spain, Italy and other EU states are facing similar language campaigns.
The Paca council, which subsidises the region's busy arts world, including the Avignon theatre festival and the Cannes film festival, has begun cutting funds to institutions that ignore an April charter 'forbidding inclusive writing in the regional public administration and all subsidy applications'.
Marine Le Pen, the leader of the hard-right National Rally, hailed the Paca charter as a victory for common sense.
The first victim was Kourtrajmé, a small, award-winning cinema school for underprivileged youngsters in Marseilles, which lost its €70,000 annual subsidy in April. The school had persisted in using terms that it knew were 'about left-wing activism', Muselier's spokeswoman said.
In a response similar to the reaction to President Trump's anti-diversity moves in the United States, the region's cultural institutions, including its festivals, are discreetly revising their websites and communications to avoid offending the local strictures, le Monde newspaper reported. The region's family planning agency had also modified its website.
'Very few organisations are talking openly about it out of fear of suffering the same punishment as Kourtrajmé, but in the training, social and cultural sector, the pressure from the region is well known,' it said
Marie Antonelle Joubert, the director of the cinema school, said: 'I am stunned to see that, because we use a language that displeases politicians, they refuse to finance a unique school that enables … youngsters from Marseilles to join the cinema industry.'
The regional politicians were stuck in the 20th century, she added.
Jean-Marc Coppola, the left-wing deputy mayor in charge of culture in Marseilles, the capital of the Paca region, called the regional move 'a blow against freedom of thought'.
Françoise Nyssen, a former minister of culture under Macron who is president of the Avignon Festival, said the question was difficult. 'Inclusive writing can sometimes be complicated for people with dyslexia and developmental disorders,' she said.
The conservative-led French senate passed a bill in 2023 outlawing the use of inclusive language in official documents but the draft fell by the wayside when Macron called snap elections to the lower house last year. The centre-right minority government led by François Bayrou, has no plans to revive it.
