The author is a professor of literature in Montreal, contributor to the journal Argument and essayist. He notably published These words that think for us (Liber, 2017) and Why do our children leave school ignorant? (Boreal, 2008).
Until recently, inclusive writing was still only a new form of activist writing, cultivated in some feminist or progressive circles and which allowed some to display their political or societal commitment by ostentatiously using doublets. and midpoints. Since then, it has been established in a number of institutions, notably the federal administration, universities and CEGEPs, thereby changing its nature.
Guides to inclusive writing are multiplying, with their procession of recommendations generally formulated along the lines of: don’t write anymore / write instead. No longer write “students”, “teachers”, but instead write “students”, “faculty” or “teachers”. Avoid “adjectives and past participles”, or even “passive expressions” (which make gender agreements inevitable), etc.
In principle, these are simple recommendations: these guides are supposed to help “anyone wishing to write, revise or translate inclusively into French” and “serve as a source of inspiration” (as the preamble of the‘Inclusionary, this collection of “inclusive solutions” which appears on the Language Portal of Canada website). In practice, these recommendations coming from your employer or the State have an obvious prescriptive nature.
This is why, parenthetically, it is always amusing to hear certain people defend this so-called “inclusive” writing by alleging that spelling like the language evolves and that uses change. This is obviously not a question of a usage spreading freely within a given linguistic community, but of the authoritarian imposition of a Newspeak. The two phenomena should in no way be confused. (Unlike terms or expressions that have passed into common usage, Newspeaks fade away and cease to be used as soon as the coercion that imposed them disappears.)
Abuse of power
In this regard, it is also rather ironic that people who only hear the expression “power relations” do not realize that, as soon as an employer imposes such newspeak on its employees, it an abuse of power occurs. Because, on the one hand, the language belongs to all its users and inventing a new grammar like a new spelling is not the responsibility of university or college administrations, nor even that of the federal government; in Quebec, this power of “linguistic officialization” belongs to the Office de la langue française.
And on the other hand, because, in doing so, the said employer also imposes on its employees an ideological conception of their own language, of its history, of its grammatical genres, of its grammar, which – to simplify – would all be the fruit of exclusion and age-old sexism (otherwise why would we have to make them inclusive at all?), which is a biased and limited conception, to say the least, of what a language is (or, for that matter, a grammatical genre). ) and how it evolves.
At this stage of my argument, perhaps it is also not useless to recall that the political regimes which have, in the recent past, dared to impose such radical changes to the language used by the populations placed under their guardianship were not precisely democratic regimes. And yet they generally only attacked the lexicon as well as the greeting formulas, leaving the grammar, syntax or pronominal system of Russian or German more or less unscathed.
In the name of this so-called inclusion, a strange authoritarianism then imposes itself, which goes so far as to demand that we renounce “passive expressions” or the use of adjectives and past participles!
Opposition
However, if you refuse these new uses, you are considered, without you having expressed the slightest opinion on the subject, for horrible misogynists or ugly transphobes. In other words, this writing which claims to be “inclusive” is above all a machine intended to exclude all those who, for various reasons, refuse to give in to this new fashion. If it actually “includes”, it is therefore primarily within a group which now sees itself defined by this new compliance which is in reality a bringing into line. It is in fact imposed by mimicry, everyone fearing the judgment of their colleagues, especially their superiors, if they do not use it like them.
However, as the proponents of this Newspeak invent ways of saying that are more and more confusing for the majority (such as “person who gives birth” or “person with a penis”), the latter becomes more and more reluctant. in addition against these new uses that we intend to impose on it. You hardly need to be a great cleric to guess that this will arouse increasingly virulent opposition in the future.
In order to prevent such a linguistic conflict from escalating further, the Quebec government should undoubtedly take its responsibilities and rule on these new standards which are imposed by managers of institutions who spend a lot of money for this purpose. of public money. Unless the courts find themselves having to decide the thorny question of an employer’s right to authoritatively impose on its employees new speeches or writings which are not part of any custom.