We had an interesting lesson in French today where we talked about inclusive language in French.

To be honest, I thought that anyone who doesn’t identify as male or female would have used “vous” which is the equivalent of “they” or a formal “you” in French but I was wrong.

The pronoun iel is used instead which is a mix of il (he) and elle (she).

If you’ve learned french you’ll also realise that adjectives change their endings depending on the gender too. This means that you now need to have a way to write (and say) the phrase in a way to cover this new change in the language.

Now, you’ll need to use the (dot) e or (dot)es (plurals)

So this means that you’ll be seeing the full stop in some words to make it gender inclusive. Some new words and pronouns will now be included and will need to be taught and used.

Here’s an example:

Male: Tous, Tout

Feminine: Toute, toutes(pl)

Inclusive: Touste, touste(s)

So when addressing a group you will say “Bonjour à tous, toutes et toustes”

So can you see how confusing it is?

Examples of how to Write in Sentences

Iel est allé•e se trouver

Un•e ami•e est venu•e me voir

C’est pour elleux qu’iels ont discuté avec ellui

This is only a basic example. Currently the government is drawing up the new rules around how to use inclusive language and change all written communication to meet these new standards.

For now, it’s a bit too much for me in the sense that French for me is normally a difficult language anyway to ensure genders and agreements take place.

I came away with a headache. 🤕

However it’ll be something I’ll need to learn as it means that I’ll be seeing more of this inclusive language in all written media that I read.

In English, we have the pronoun “they” but we have it way easier than the French or indeed any other language that has gendered nouns, adjectives and agreements for such. I take it countries like Spain, Germany and Italy are also going through the same? 🤔 Greece may be different because their language incorporates gender neutral pronouns (singular and plural) and endings anyway so in some way, they’ve already got it covered.

Here’s a good guide:

https://divergenres.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/guide-grammaireinclusive-final.pdf

Some interesting viewing: