Nearly two hundred years ago, the French writer Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr wrote, āplus Ƨa change, plus cāest le mĆŖme chose.ā The more things change, the more they stay the same. No matter what time and tide bring, defenders of ātraditionā and āpurityā will always stand its path, armed with all the cudgels at their disposal to beat it back. A recent example is the storm of protests that erupted over the recognition of a non-binary pronoun by a dictionary. Le Petit Robert, one of the leading French dictionaries, has added the word āielā ā a combination of the masculine āilā and the feminine āelleā ā in its online list of words, in an effort to be more inclusive of those who do not identify as male or female.
And that is precisely why Le Petit Robert decided to include the new pronoun ā to reflect the reality that a language, much like those who use it, is a living thing that grows and changes over time. To those who fulminate against this incontrovertible fact, like education minister Jean-Michel Blanquer, who reportedly said that āinclusive writing is not the future of the French languageā, one can only say: Cāest la vie.
This editorial first appeared in the print edition on December 2, 2021 under the title āPardon our Frenchā.
