Gender neutral language in French: Difference between revisions

In the context of gender-inclusive language in French, the distinction between compounds that blend or concatenate gender-marked agentive suffixes (e.g.: 'direct<u>eur</u>'''ice'''<nowiki/>') ''versus'' lexical (e.g.: 'sœur' and 'frère' → 'adelphe') and morphological substitutions (→ cognitive view)/derivations (→ structural view) ('direct<u>aire</u>') are usually referred to as 'inclusif' ''versus'' 'neutre' in queer-positive communities, because the concatenation of gender-marked agentive suffixes adds the missing gender i.e. sexus [[wikipedia:Sememe|sememe]] to the given [[wikipedia:English_nouns|personal noun]], turning it from a single-gender personal noun to a dual-gender masculine/feminine personal noun.<ref name=":0" /> However, since compounds — such as 'maon', from 'ma' and 'mon' — and portmanteau words, like 'utilisateurice', could theoretically be cognitively interpreted as neutral; at least, there have been no psycholinguistic studies disconfirming this yet (probably because the use of these neologisms is too peripheral), to the extent that these forms could technically also be called neutral. Furthermore, since the so called 'neutre' forms are inherently inclusive of all genders, there is no reason why they cannot be called that way either. The subsequent pragmatic interchangeability of these terms makes them unsuitable for differentiating these two methods of creating gender-neutral/gender inclusive words in French. For this reason, the following table distinguishes them based on their morphological properties — blend words being more '''analytical''', and non blend words being more '''synthetic'''.