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).
As I mentioned in a previous text, inclusive writing guides are multiplying in our public institutions and particularly in our educational establishments. With them also multiply the recommendations regarding writing practices, in order to supposedly make them more inclusive, which range from the advice to “avoid adjectives and past participles” (because they agree), or to substitute “noun complements” with other supposedly more neutral formulations (we will thus replace “student success” with “student success”, in order to avoid the generic masculine), up to the point of preferring “student success”. impersonal expressions” (write, for example, and for the same reason as in the previous example, “It is recommended…” rather than “Teachers recommend…”). In certain cases, we will even recommend the use of completely unusual expressions such as “student people” or “teaching people” to accommodate possible individuals who identify as non-binary.
It is obvious that these recommendations (of which the previous paragraph provides only a small sample) are completely changing the face of the French language. Decreeing, in particular, that it is appropriate, in order to play hide and seek with the omnipresent agreements in French, to avoid adjectives and past participles is not trivial. Nor is it correct to recommend the use of “impersonal expressions”. In addition to forcing writers and speakers into all kinds of linguistic contortions, this last recommendation which, coming from an employer, very quickly turns into a requirement, in fact generates a depersonalization of the language and thus attacks an element constituent of French.
In Against single thought, Claude Hagège noted that, “when the events reported are likely to involve a human subject, French clearly tends to represent them according to this subject”, while “English tends to relate rather what is happening, to the exclusion of all human interpretation. If we are to believe the eminent linguist, the preference imposed for “impersonal expressions” therefore does not only constitute a measure intended to promote “inclusion”. It is also about denying one of the specificities of the French language in order to align its use with that of English.
The same goes for deal hunting. The omnipresence of agreements in French suddenly becomes a linguistic defect, a sin particular to this language, while all modern sciences of language are based on the idea that languages all constitute systems of different but equivalent signs (in other words , that there is no language that is superior or inferior to another). Should we now believe that, thanks to said “inclusiveness” and like Orwellian animals, certain languages are more “equal” than others? As luck would have it, English would thus find itself in the leading group of “inclusive” languages which favor “non-gendered” formulations since gender agreements are relatively rare, therefore easy to avoid, while French would be relegated, him, at the back of the pack, gender agreements and the generic masculine manifesting themselves everywhere and being inevitable, unless they torture syntax and grammar.
Moreover, it is still the mold of English that we find behind formulations such as “student person”. Where Shakespeare’s language says student card Or student associationn, French should rather say “student card” or “student association”. The influence of English is therefore probably not unrelated to this recent proliferation of these noun groups without a preposition, as public communications specialists and advertisers like to invent.
No doubt it is no coincidence either that one of the main sources of inspiration for the authors of these so-called “inclusive” writing guides is in Canada the federal government’s site L’inclusionnaire, a sort of supreme guide which claims offer “inclusive solutions” to “replace” “gendered words”. Solutions which it must be emphasized that they are much more daring than those recommended by the Office québécois de la langue française, and clearly less consistent than the latter with the spirit (or the specific genius) of the French language.
Thus, the English language would no longer be, as in the past, the famous “business language” which shone with its pragmatism and was opposed to a poor French language constrained by its traditions and corseted by its overly restrictive syntax. But it does not lose its proudly displayed superiority. She does not fall to the bottom of her pedestal. By metamorphosing into a “language of inclusiveness”, quite flexible and malleable, especially in the face of an inescapably binary French, to celebrate all genres, English remains the “great language” once ironically celebrated by André Brochu, the only worthy to express “everything that deserves to be said, thought, imposed, admired”.
It would obviously be improper to see in this relegation of French to the status of a second language, a simple language of translation, the slightest “power relationship” of colonial origin.