The French are blaming American “wokisme” for their new nonbinary pronoun, iel, recently recognized by the authoritative dictionary, Le Petit Robert online, aka Dico en ligne.
The French frequently accuse Americans of polluting their vocabulary. Now they're adding inclusive language to the many American crimes against language. But although it’s true that interest in both gendered and genderless pronouns has increased in the US as part of the larger discussion of LGBT rights, the first genderless pronoun was actually coined by a Frenchman some 250 years ago.
In 1765, the accountant Joachim Faiguet de Villeneuve thought up the third-person, singular, gender-free pronoun lo for a universal language called Langue nouvelle—that’s French for ‘new language.’ Faiguet described his new language in an article in Denis Diderot’s “Encyclopédie.” Fortunately, Faiguet didn’t quit his day job. Both lo and Langue nouvelle were greeted with a gallic shrug.
In contrast to this French inventiveness, Americans came late to the pronoun-coining game. It wasn’t till 1841 that Francis A. Brewster, a physician who had earned his MD from Yale the year before but apparently had plenty of time on his hands, published an English grammar which introduced the “masculor feminine” pronouns e, es, and em. Brewster was not particularly “woke” and he never said what he meant by “masculor feminine,” a term not found anywhere else. That in itself is a big deal, because masculofemina is Latin for ‘man-woman,’ or ‘hermaphrodite,’ and intentional or not, Brewster’s use of the term is surely the first hint at fluid gender reference in an English grammar book. Brewster did quit doctoring—he wound up selling insurance. But like Faiguet’s universal language, Brewster’s grammar went largely ignored.
It turns out that adapting pronouns or coining new ones began long before the age of wokeness, however you define woke. Singular they, referring to a person whose gender is unknown or irrelevant, got its start in fourteenth-century England. The Scottish economist James Anderson wanted to enlist the dialect word ou as a “common gender” pronoun in 1792, and in 1808, the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge proposed repurposing it or which as non-gendered pronouns to replace generic he. In 1851, the English philosopher John Stuart Mill called for a new pronoun that wouldn’t leave out women, who constitute half the people. But until that pronoun came along, Mill resigned himself to using the generic he. In 1929, the prominent suffragist Lady Annette Matthews argued for the creation of a “bi-sex” pronoun so that newly-enfranchised women would no longer be “an afterthought.” Perhaps responding to Lady Matthews, A. A. Milne, the creator of Winnie the Pooh, offered heesh in 1930, though like Mill before him, Milne continued to use he.
Back on this side of the pond, in 1858 the American composer C. C. Converse created common-gender thon by blending that and one. And in 1912, Chicago Superintendent of Schools Ella Flagg Young promoted another set of blended pronouns, he’er, his’er, and him’er. The lexicographer Isaac Funk put he’er in his Funk and Wagnalls in 1913, and an entry for thon appeared in Merriam-Webster’s Second New International Dictionary in 1934. Unfortunately, putting pronouns in the dictionary didn't make them more popular, and Webster dropped thon from the Third Unabridged thirty years later.
Newspapers got into the pronoun game as well. Zie first appeared in a Chicago Tribune editorial in 1890. And hir was coined for the Sacramento Bee by founding editor C. K. McClatchy in 1920. The Bee used hir sporadically through the 1940s, then quietly abandoned it.
In all, more than 200 borrowed, repurposed, or coined genderless pronouns have been suggested for English since the eighteenth century, including ip, sie, se, xe, tey, and per. Some were the work of well-known writers; others were crafted by anonymous “concerned citizens.” With the exception of singular they, most flopped.
But back to French iel.
Non-gendered iel appeared as early as 2014 in La Symphonie des abysses, a young adult novel by Carina Rozenfeld. The pronoun drew complaints in 2017, when it appeared, along with the alternative ille, in a pamphlet on inclusive writing distributed by the French High Council on the Equality between Women and Men.
The French Academy, guardians of the language since 1666, promptly warned that such innovations would signal the death of French and allow other languages to win the race for world domination.
But iel hasn’t gone away, and to paraphrase Monty Python, French is not dead yet. Nevertheless, the inclusion of iel in the online Robert was immediately condemned by Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer, and other critics quickly piled on. First lady Brigitte Macron, a former French teacher, insisted that two pronouns, il and elle, were enough for French. François Jolivet, a member of the National Aseembly who has sponsored a bill to ban inclusive writing, tweeted that iel is an example of “le wokisme” and has nothing to do with French. He complained to the French Academy that including iel in a trusted reference work heralds the advent of a “woke” ideology that will destroy “our values.”
In an essay for Le Figaro, Stéphane Chaudier, a specialist in modern French literature at the University of Lille, produced a long list of what’s wrong with iel. Despite insisting that he had nothing against linguistic creativity, Chaudier condemned iel as contrary to the “genius” of French. That's what purists say when they don’t like a new word. Chaudier also objected that iel is ambiguous, sometimes meaning ‘he or she,’ and sometimes, ‘I don’t know the gender of the person I’m referring to.’ But linguistic ambiguity is a feature, not a flaw. For example, English you is ambiguous, doubling as both singular and plural, yet speakers easily develop workarounds like you all and you guys, or they ask, “Are you talking to me?”
Chaudier then complained that iel is too long—it’s got too many phonemes compared to il and elle. This certainly won't slow down French conversation, plus, on the page, iel is actually one letter shorter than the pronouns elle, vous, or nous. Chaudier argued too that there’s no need for iel, since French already has a neutral pronoun, on, the equivalent of English ‘one’—though languages often have more than one way of saying something. And—this claim is particularly bizarre, if not downright incorrect—Chaudier labeled iel a feminine pronoun that includes the masculine (“iel est une forme de féminin incluant le masculin”), and he asks, Why is that better than the generic masculine, or even the generic feminine? A more objective observer sees that iel blends the masculine and feminine pronouns sequentially, i(l)-el(le), to produce a printed form iel in which the masculine appears to include the feminine, functioning like generic il but at least making the feminine just a bit more visible. Iel is binary, to be sure, but it could suggest a fluidity of gender to include trans and nonbinary references as well.
Perhaps worst of all, according to Chaudier, iel is elitist. That’s a stunning claim to make in Le Figaro, a snob newspaper that doesn’t cater to the average French working stiff. In any case, Chaudier concludes that there's nothing to recommend iel and it will certainly die an unlamented death.
Charles Bimbenet, head of the Robert dictionaries, answered the objections to iel by explaining that the role of the lexicographer is not to engineer language or to promote or resist social change, but to chart the evolution of French. A committee voted to include iel in the online Robert after finding that, although the pronoun remains rare, there has been a significant increase in its use over the past months. Lexicographers can be snarky, and Bimbenet added that Robert has yet to define “wokisme,” though it will do so soon, since even the anti-woke in France are using the term.
The survival of iel won't depend on its inclusion in a dictionary and the objections of purists won't kill it, since complaints about an innovation often signal that the new form is taking hold and resistance may be futile. Instead, the future of iel depends on whether or not enough people use the pronoun in inclusive speech and writing, whether formal or informal.
But the recent controversy over iel has made the inclusive pronoun more prominent than ever. Delphine Jouenne chose iel as the word for December in her annual round up of words for 2021, Un bien grand mot. And although the French cultural historian and member of the Académie Française Pascal Ory told Le Figaro that the inclusion of iel in Le Petit Robert was unnecessary and premature, he also conceded that since language is guided by usage, if iel is accepted by the public in the years to come, then the Academy will approve the term.
Today there’s renewed interested in inclusive language, and more and more people announce their pronouns on social media and in professional settings. Not just in English, but also in Swedish, Spanish, German, and yes, even French, where les français have long resisted the mandates and grumblings of their censorious language overlords. Because as the existence of lo, e, iel and all the other genderless pronouns so clearly shows, whenever the speakers of a language sense there’s a word missing, they beg, borrow, or steal one, or they make one up.
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To learn more about pronouns, both genderless and binary and everything in between, pick up a copy of my latest book, What's Your Pronoun: Beyond He or She, here or wherever you buy or borrow books.
