Gender Identification in French: from Ideology to Morphology

Abstract

The spread of the feminitives (gender-marked nouns) is a modern trend of the language development resulting from the social processes. It is taking place within systemic identification and validation of the woman in texts. The history of sociolinguistic opposition of the French-speaking society to the use of feminitives andtext feminization has significant differences between various French-speaking countries, a subject researched by linguistics, sociolinguistics and geolinguistics. The Canadian province of Québec published its recommendations on use of feminitives as early as in 1979; later they were elaborated, refined and expanded. Swiss Geneva passed provisions for the feminisation of professions in 1988; a respective guide was developed in 1991. Respective Belgian regulations were introduced in 1993. However, all the French-speaking countries recognise France’s right to take any final decision regarding questions of the French language. The country had a waiting attitude and made its first steps towards gender identification in 1984, while the big changes that attracted the attention of the society took place in 1998. Since then detailed revision of the language policy became regular aiming at securing a strong position in the modern world. In 2018, the use of feminitives was ordered to be obligatory in the legal documents. French academic circles stress that “the natural evolution” of the language is taking place.