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France Bans Gender-Neutral Words In Schools, Says They’re ‘Harmful’ To French Language

By • May 17, 2021 3:03 pm

Contrary to the recent push of the United States to adopt the use of “gender-neutral” terms, France is bucking the global spread of the woke culture as it moved to ban such terms in its schools citing how it would erode the French language.

Reports noted that gender activists have been pushing for the use of full stops to break up words and include both male and female endings in an effort to make language “more inclusive.”

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The Daily Mail said “in French grammar, nouns take on the gender of the subject to which they refer, with male preferred over female in mixed settings.”

The “woke” proposal was, however, rejected by the Academie Francaise (French Academy), a 400-year-old education body responsible for the preservation of the French language.

It noted that the push to change the rules and move into the use of gender-neutral terms would be “harmful to the practice and understanding of [French].”

“Danger to the country”

“Advocates say the midpoints make French ‘more inclusive’ but critics say it creates differences between written and spoken French which make the language harder to learn and threaten its entire existence,” the report said.

Nathalie Elimas, the French state secretary for priority education, said the move to make the French language ‘gender neutral’ will not increase its popularity, but will instead drive more people to learn English which does not gender its nouns.

She also noted how the proposed gender-neutral changes were “a danger for our country” and “the death knell for the use of French in the world.”

“With the spread of inclusive writing, the English language  — already quasi-hegemonic across the world  —  would certainly and perhaps forever defeat the French language,” Elimas said as the ban was issued, further explaining that the use of midpoints “dislocates words, breaks them into two.”

French education minister Jean-Michel Blanquer told French publication Le Journal du Dimanche that the use of midpoints would also present challenges for those with learning disabilities, such as dyslexia.

 

“In addition, this writing, which results in the fragmentation of words and agreements, constitutes an obstacle to reading and understanding the written word,” Blanquer said. “The impossibility of verbally transcribing texts using this type of writing hampers reading aloud as well as pronunciation, and consequently learning, especially for the youngest.”

Following the decision of the Academie Francaise, a French teacher’s union, a left-wing group “SUD Education Union” — one of France’ largest teaching unions — blasted the ruling and told schools to ignore the guidelines from the French government.

“SUD Education demands from the Minister that he stop trying to impose his backwardness on the educational community,” the statement said. 

“SUD calls on staff to take no account of these instructions from another time, and to exercise as they wish, depending on professional situations, the full use of their pedagogical freedom,” it added.

Top French politicians, journalists, and academics have recently expressed concern about the spreading “cancel culture” — from the United States — and how it could influence French culture.

 

The New York Times earlier said: “Emboldened by these comments, prominent intellectuals have banded together against what they regard as contamination by the out-of-control woke leftism of American campuses and its attendant cancel culture.”

“With its echoes of the American culture wars, the battle began inside French universities but is being played out increasingly in the media,” it added, noting that politicians have been weighing in more and more about the issue.

French President Emmanuel Macron as early as October delivered a speech where he sounded the alarm on “certain social science theories entirely imported from the United States” which is threatening the French culture.

Macron said in his speech that “many of these topics in which France used to excel academically have been undermined and we have abandoned them.”

“In so doing, we have left the intellectual debate to others, to those outside of the Republic by ideologizing it, sometimes yielding to other academic traditions … And when I see certain social science theories entirely imported from the United States, with their problems, which I respect and which exist, but which are just added to ours, I say to myself that it is reasonable to make this choice,” Macron said then.

“So we must, very clearly, re-invest, on a massive scale, in the field of social sciences, history, understanding of civilizations by creating posts, by stepping up dialogue, academic and scientific debate in order not to allow the knowledge, the understanding of Islam as a religion, of the civilization it underpins and its contribution to our country and our continent to become ideological and exclusively political debates,” he added.

Fight “woke” US ideologies

Blanquer said in October that there is a need to fight the ideologies coming from American educational institutions — which has slowly succumbed to the “woke movement” — often perpetuated by progressive members of the country.

“No one has the right to cowardice anymore,” Blanquer told The Daily Wire.

He added: “There is a fight to be waged against an intellectual matrix coming from American universities and intersectional theses, which want to essentialize communities and identities, at the antipodes of our republican model which, for its part, postulates equality between human beings, independently of their characteristics of origin, sex, religion.”

“It is the breeding ground for a fragmentation of our society and a vision of the world which converges with the interests of the Islamists,” Blanquer added.

Meanwhile, in the US, the Democrat-led House of Representatives have moved to pitch a major change in the House rules, including removing all ‘gendered’ terms as the leadership moves to make Congress “more inclusive.”

The move of Democrats was earlier slammed by fellow Democrat, former Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who noted that the move is “hypocritical” for the same party that claims to stand for women’s rights.

Steeve Strange

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