The pronoun “iel”, a contraction of “he” and “she”, has just entered the online version of the Le Petit Robert dictionary. This personal subject pronoun of the third person aims to “to evoke a person, whatever his gender”. This pronoun is therefore non-gendered and its use is “rare”, specifies the dictionary. The initiative is not to everyone’s taste in government and creates discord.
It all started with an open letter, sent Tuesday, November 16 by the LREM deputy François Jolivet to the French Academy, in which he said “amazed at this initiative”. He was quickly supported in this by Jean-Michel Blanquer, the Minister of National Education. “When a dictionary is a reference dictionary – including for our children – we cannot afford to be in a kind of inventiveness that has nothing to do with what is the language, quite simply”, he justified Wednesday on LCI.
Before going any further, we must start by recalling a few fundamental points. What is a dictionary? It is not a normative tool, but a descriptive one. The dictionary doesn’t decide how to speak, it just describes how people speak. It is said that it “consecrates the uses”. Jean-Michel Blanquer’s accusation, according to which Le Robert would pour into inventiveness, is therefore irrelevant. The goal is simply to allow someone who meets the pronoun “iel” in a text and does not understand it to have a resource to refer to.
At the same time, Jean-Michel Blanquer has been critical of inclusive writing for a long time. This is what, more generally, is at stake. He said it in his very first tweet on the subject: “I obviously support François Jolivet’s protest. Inclusive writing is not the future of the French language.”
It is also worth stopping for a moment. The future of a language is the use that determines it. This is, it seems to me, one of the few points of agreement between all linguists. You can come up with any code you want, from the most traditional to the most innovative, the only thing that matters is whether the language community is going to take it over. In short, it is the people who speak the language who decide the future of their language: it is neither the French Academy, nor Le Robert, which is a private dictionary, nor the Minister of National Education.
In fact, this pronoun has a usage, still rare but growing, in people who do not identify as either a man or a woman, d‘after the Robert librarians who responded to Jean-Michel Blanquer. Moreover, this position is found right at the heart of the government. “Why is it so shocking to say that, potentially, we can say ‘iel’ because it enriches the language and is a neutral pronoun?”, thus defended Wednesday on franceinfo Élisabeth Moreno, Minister responsible for Equality between Women and Men. “VS‘is progress for people who want to recognize themselves in this pronoun and I don’t see what that takes away from those who don’t want to use it. “
Elisabeth Moreno’s position is therefore very different: she leaves the field of theoretical discussion to focus on linguistic uses and the feelings of individuals. This highlights the political aspect of the reaction of Jean-Michel Blanquer and François Jolivet. Beyond the pronoun “iel”, it is something else that is targeted. Moreover, François Jolivet says it very well: “I see this as a first step or a stigma of woke culture, which is sometimes expressed in inclusive language”, he says on LCI.
Here then is the adversary which it is advisable to strike: the supposed “wokism”, of which I had the occasion to say that it had especially become a scarecrow word, without precise content, aiming at disqualifying the movements of fight against. racism, sexism and discrimination. The pronoun “iel” is nothing more than a new ground in which to deploy this political struggle. The problem is that behind this pronoun, there are individuals, who claim to identify as “non-binary” or “fluid gender”. We may not understand these people but that does not prevent us from hearing that they have had a different experience from ours. To conclude, I come back to the letter from François Jolivet, from which it all started. He writes : “This kind of initiative results in a tainted tongue.” Did he think for a moment how his words could be received by the individuals concerned?