Not content to degrade and mangle the English language in their mission to make it conform to their progressive ideology, the forces of hyperliberalism are now seeking to foist changes on languages spoken by people elsewhere.
As revealed in yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph, GCSE students are being allowed to use gender-neutral nouns, pronouns and adjectives in their Spanish, German and French lessons. In a move designed to make the curricula more inclusive, pupils in French classes are currently permitted to use the pronouns ‘iel’ or ‘ille’ instead of ‘il’ or ‘elle’, and ‘iels’ to represent an all-encompassing gender-neutral term for ‘ils/elles’.
While students in this tongue are allowed to change ‘amies’, meaning ‘female friends’, to ‘ami.e.s’ or ‘ami*e*s’, those in Spanish classes, who might have otherwise described their parents as ‘padres’, may now call them ‘xadres’ or ‘mapadres’. Students of German, that toughest of foreign tongues, have a new set of pronouns to choose from, including ‘xier’ and ‘xiese’. Pearson Edexcel, the exam board responsible for this fresh guidance for students in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, has reportedly introduced the measures with the support of the LGBT charity Stonewall.
That’s languages for you: they’re unreasonable monsters that can never be tamed
Understandably, the revelation has not gone down well on the other side of the English Channel. Jean-Michel Blanquer, the former French education minister, has called the guidance ‘absurd’, adding that ‘French grammar has not changed in this regard. And the use of “iel” does not correspond to any widespread usage among the French population.’ Bernard Cerquiglini, an editor at the Larousse dictionary, has called teaching students gender-neutral pronouns ‘nonsense’.
There’s an irony in trying to propagate a form of French, Spanish or German that is barely spoken in the lands of their origin. What could be more colonial-minded and arrogant than telling others how their language should be spoken and how it ought to be amended to accord to modern mores and whims?
The French have long been on their guard for that behemoth of Anglo-Saxon cultural and linguistic imperialism. Part of the reason why they have proved immune to the excesses of wokery is that they regard it as an American invention and import (notwithstanding its intellectual origins in French post-structuralist philosophy, but let’s not get into that now).
This is why they have seen off attempts to introduce ugly neologisms, the prospect of which made itself known shortly after the Great Awokening ten years ago. These have been rejected by Emmanuel Macron, the French President, as well as by the L’Académie française, that redoubtable body tasked with preserving the purity of their language: it decreed in 2017 that gender-neutral pronouns were ‘harmful to the practice and comprehension of the French language.’
As all Spectator readers will know, the reason why L’Académie française spells its name that way is because adjectives in the singular commonly add an ‘-e’ when referring to a feminine noun. Different languages just have different rules, and the first lesson all anglophones have to learn is that in French nouns are either masculine or feminine, no matter how silly or arbitrary that strikes every single British child when they find this out.
It’s thanks to the speakers of Norman French that English lost its gendered nouns – Anglo-Saxon, like German today, had masculine, feminine and neuter. For a few hundred years after 1066, English became an underground and mostly unwritten language, undergoing a radical streamlining in the process. Yet this simplicity has since proved a handicap when its speakers have tried to understand that the languages spoken by our neighbours retain this structure.
This ignorance persists today among ignorant, year-zero hyperliberals, unaware of the impossibility of reorganising languages in which gender is deeply embedded. It’s already been tried and found wanting in countries where Romance languages are spoken. Feminists in France have for years sought to overturn the norm that a group of men and women are referred to as masculine. That rule seems unfair and faintly illogical when a group of ninety-nine women and one man is rendered ‘ils’. But that’s languages for you: they’re unreasonable monsters that can never be tamed.
Trying to revolutionise vernaculars by diktat, prompted by fashion or politics, invariably founders. It does so because languages have a life of their own and are highly resistant to change imposed from above, especially by disagreeable ideologues. While ‘they’ has gradually become a more acceptable alternative for ‘he’ or ‘she’, other mooted changes, such ‘s/he’, first reported by the OED in 1871, or, more recently, ‘ze’ and ‘xe’, have utterly failed to get a foothold.
These attempts have been stillborn because the majority of people don’t accept that their sex or gender is a ‘social construct’. On a deeper level, such efforts have failed because, as that great French social anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss reminded us, all humans, irrespective of cultures, think in binaries. It’s hard-wired into us. C’est la vie.
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