Gender neutral language in French: Difference between revisions

How do neologisms become part of the vocabulary of a language? Roswitha Fischer, citing Renate Bartsch,<ref>Bartsch, Renate (1987): ''Sprachnormen: Theorie und Praxis: Studienausgabe''. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter. <nowiki>https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110935875</nowiki>,</ref> puts it like this:<blockquote>"1) [T]he item is used by a prestigious group that is educated and has political and economical power; 2) it is used in written discourse; and 3) it is located in an area where several varieties come into contact and assimilate [...]."<ref name=":16">Fischer, Roswitha (1998): ''Lexical Change in Present-Day English. A Corpus-Based Study of the Motivation, Institutionalization, and Productivity of Creative Neologism''. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag. Online at: <nowiki>https://books.google.ch/books?id=H93nAVbwZwwC&printsec=frontcover&hl=de#v=onepage&q&f=false</nowiki>.</ref></blockquote>Currently, gender neutral French neologisms are not widespread, even in LGBT and, more specifically, nonbinary communities. We find isolated uses of them in the written form<ref>Café aux étoiles. maison d'édition sereine et onirique (no data): ''Littérature''. Online at: https://cafeauxetoiles.fr/litterature/.</ref><ref>Les Ourses à plumes. Webzine féministe (2022): ''Les elfes noirs ne sont jamais noirs (1) : enjeux de la représentation dans les fictions de l'imaginaire''. Online at: https://lesoursesaplumes.info/tag/une/.</ref>; their use in speech remains rather peripheral too. However, they are located on the Internet, where African, American, European and minority language francophones all around the world can technically meet. Additionally, descriptive (cf. Le Robert) instead of prescriptive (cf. L'Académie) approaches have lead to one of them, 'iel', being used in written discourse since 2021.

Neologisms should be learnable. That means that they should be easily understandable and easy to remember (cf. morphological linguistic motivation), easy to pronounce — meaning that they should respect the phoneme inventory and the phonotactics of the given language —, familiar and responding to a need.<ref name=":16" /> If all these criteria are met, they will start being used by some avant-gardists. If some of these avant-gardists gather big online communities, the frequency to which these words will be used will rise, creating familiarity with these form. Then, it would be likely that some of them would find their way into the standard vocabulary.