Gender neutral language in French

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Gender neutral language

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Like all Romance languages, French has many gendered markers in nouns and adjectives. This page explains the different strategies that are used to be as neutral as possible with this language.

Non neologisms

• Refeminization: Before the 17th century, French had — as Italian, Spanish, and other Romance languages still have today — a feminine inflection for female professionals. However, for several reasons (both societal, i.e., misogynistic and linguistic, as the French language was being standardized and dialect speakers were expected to learn French), grammarians made sure that the feminine denominations vanished from the language. Today, a lot of people talk of "feminization", because they feel like these occupational titles are neologisms. However, they actually aren't, since they are being recovered from an older version of the French language, which is why "refeminization" is more accurate. Even though it sounds counter-intuitive, refeminization is part of a process to degenderize the French language, since studies from different languages have shown that the generic masculine is cognitively not neutral, even though the French prescriptive grammar considers it as such. By mentioning also the feminine form of a word, speakers visualize people of more genders than just one.

Masculine	Feminine by the Académie	Refeminized
un auteur	une auteur(e)	une autrice
un professeur	une professeur(e)	une professeuse
un peintre	une peintre	une peintresse
un chirurgien	une femme chirurgien	une chirurgienne

• Doublets: For example, « Nous prions les étudiantes et (les) étudiants de remettre leur copie à la personne responsable ». Some people don't enjoy the repetition, others consider that the doublets don't encompass all genders, others again are unsure which form to mention first, since the order conveys information about the value the speaker gives to each item.

• Shortened doublets: The feminine suffix is attached to the masculine, rather than the whole word being repeated (as in classical doublets).

Middle dot	Dot	Parentheses	Slash	Dash
professionnel·les professionnel·le·s	acteur.rice	employé(e)	chanteur/euse	boulanger-ère

• Epicene person descriptions: For example, « Les élèves apprennent leur leçon. »; « L'enfant regarde la télévision. »; « Les juges ont pris leur décision. ». Since singular articles mark gender ("la" and "le"), this functions best with plural forms. It works with singular forms if the noun starts with a vowel, because the article automatically turns into "l'...", which doesn't mark gender. A downside is that there aren't epicene occupational titles for all professions or functions.

• Grammatically fixed gender nouns and impersonal formulations: The table below shows gendered language on the left and neutral — i.e. grammatical gender that has nothing to do with biological sex or social identity — language on the right.

Impersonal formulations

Gendered inclusive language	Neutral inclusive language
Les auditrices et auditeurs sont attentifs.	L'auditoire est attentif.
Les spectateurs et spectatrices sont très calmes aujourd'hui.	Le public est très calme aujourd'hui.

Grammatically fixed gender nouns

Marked binary gender	Grammatically fixed gender
Je ne connais pas cet homme.	Je ne connais pas cette personne.
La mère de Jo ne parle pas le néerlandais.	Le parent de Jo ne parle pas le néerlandais.

• Proximity agreement: Up to the 18th century, in adjectives and past participles, the masculine gender didn't prevail over the feminine gender in cases where the genders could theoretically be congruent: proximity agreement prevailed. This congruency allows for equality between grammatical genders instead of the masculine-over-feminine hierarchy that was decided in the 17th and 18th century by the French grammarians Malherbe, Vaugelas, Bouhours and Beauzée:
  • « Le genre masculin, étant le plus noble, doit prédominer toutes les fois que le masculin et le féminin se trouvent ensemble. » (Claude Favre de Vaugelas, Remarques sur la langue française, 1647).
  • « Lorsque les deux genres se rencontrent, il faut que le plus noble l’emporte. » (Bouhours 1675).
  • « Le genre masculin est réputé plus noble que le féminin à cause de la supériorité du mâle sur la femelle. » (Beauzée 1767).

Masculine prevails over feminine	Proximity agreement
Ces œillets et ces roses sont beaux.	Ces œillets et ces roses sont belles.
Les nombreux filles et garçons.	Les nombreuses filles et garçons.

Neologisms

• Subject pronouns: French only marks gender on the third person singular (cf. "elle" and "il"). Up to the 12th century, French knew the neutral subject pronoun "el"/"al". Today, "el" cannot be recuperated from ancient French as it would be pronounced the same as "elle", the current feminin subject pronoun. In Laurentian French (Canada), "al" sounds like "elle" in spoken language. It could, however, be an interesting candidate for the rest of the francophone community. Nevertheless, today, according to the Guide de rédaction inclusive (2021:14) from the Laval University, the Guide de grammaire neutre et inclusive (2021:5) from Divergenres, the Petit dico de français neutre/inclusif (2018) from La vie en Queer, and Wiki Trans (2019), the most widespread subject (neo)pronoun is "iel". It was added 2021 to the grand dictionary Le Robert. Next to "iel", Laurentian French also uses "ille". In metropolitan France, the "al" pronoun proposed by the linguist Alpheratz in their book Grammaire du français inclusif (2018) has gained some recognition. The following table presents the main gender neutral subject pronouns found in the French-speaking world.

	Gender neutral subject pronouns
Dominant usage	iel	ille	al
Peripheral usage	ol	ul	ael

• Clitic and tonic pronouns: French distinguishes between clitic and tonic pronouns. A clitic is a word that attaches in a syntactically rigid way to another word to form a prosodic unit with it, lacking prosodic as well as distributional autonomy. Currently, there is no prevailing gender neutral clitic direct object personal pronoun; the most common ones are detailed below.

Clitic pronouns

Subject	Direct object	Indirect object
il	le, (l')	lui
elle	la, (l')	lui
iel	lae/lo/li/lu, (l')	lui
ils	les	leur
elles	les	leur
iels	les	leur

Tonic pronouns are also called "autonomous" because, in opposition to clitics, they form their own prosodic unit and can stand alone in the sentence, hence their distribution isn't as fixed as the clitics' one. There are currently two competing systems: one consists in syncretizing (cf. analogical levelling) clitic and tonic pronouns, following the paradigm of standard French "elle", which equates keeping the gender neutral subject pronoun — be it "iel", "ille", "al" or "ol", etc. — as such; the other approach, exemplified in the table below with "iel", supports differentiating (cf. analogical extension) clitics from tonic pronouns, thereby aligning with the paradigm of "il".

Analogical extension

clitic subject pronoun	tonic pronoun
il	lui
elle	elle
iel	ellui
ils	eux
elles	elles
iels	elleux