- alyaza [they/she] ( @alyaza@beehaw.org ) 8•3 years ago
refreshing to for once not see the immediate response be prescriptivism about how iNcOrReCt a neutral third-person singular pronoun is or how it’s the product of liberal wokeness or whatever–looking at you, France
- Chris Remington ( @remington@beehaw.org ) 6•3 years ago
I’m interested in hearing more about France in this context, please.
- alyaza [they/she] ( @alyaza@beehaw.org ) 7•3 years ago
the Académie française is somewhat notorious even among regulative linguistic bodies (which are, generally, by design prescriptivist) for its degree of linguistic prescriptivism, conservatism, and general distaste for anything it perceives as watering down the linguistic purity of the French language, and this tendency has carried over into the broader French ruling class and to a lesser extent the population as a whole
when recently, a French dictionary (which are generally descriptivist bodies–dictionaries obviously and primarily exist to describe language, not prescribe it), merely recognized the upcoming, colloquial, gender-inclusive pronoun iel as existing, a French member of parliament called for the Académie to ban its use and the French education minister tweeted in support, saying: “Inclusive writing is not the future of the French language. Our students, who are consolidating their basic knowledge, cannot have that as a reference”