Dear Julien Bayou
We, ordinary users of the French language, after reading your interview in L'Express, would like to provide some necessary clarifications to your vision of what you call "inclusive writing" in order to clarify some confusing points in your judgment on the language.
You say that everyone must be included. But this cannot be done through language, which is neither inclusive nor exclusive. Not mentioning someone does not mean excluding them: on the contrary, it is often recognizing them as one of a whole: "humans" are you and me... Like all languages, French allows you to express an opinion and its opposite: you can thus hold sexist or egalitarian speeches using the same words. Language does not think for individuals. Moreover, if I follow you, all French speakers were sexist before the inclusive reform proposal: it's absurd!
You say that language is "performative." There is no magic in language, even if it suits you to believe so. There may be speech acts performative (although linguists do not all agree). No one can become a Christian without being baptized with the formula "I baptize you...". "Yes" can be performative when at marriage it answers the legal question: "Do you agree to take so-and-so as your husband?" But if you say: "tomorrow everyone will be an environmentalist", you are in incantation; not in performation. If you declare today that you are a woman: you will not magically change your physical condition. You are free to believe it; but it is our duty to remind you that no, not everything is performative.
Another point seems important: there is no relationship between femicides and the use of gender in language. For example, there is no gender in Farsi, but the number of femicides for reasons of honor in Iran is much more significant than in France, where the language has a gender distinction. There is no gender grammatically in English, but it is not certain that English women are unfortunately less victims of violence than French women. Reading you, we learn that the strange form used by the inclusivists "tou.s.tes" would be a miracle cure. But it is false. Furthermore, we inform you that studies by the late national observatory of delinquency noted that "people convicted of homicide of minors under 15 are mostly women". Have you thought about the consequences of this "visibility"? Will you talk about "assassins"? What would the cause of women gain from "visibilizing" the murdered? The Nazis? The ex/executioners? You talk about invisibility. It is a metaphor! Language does not "visibilize" in truth nothing and no one and does not constitute an instrument of identity promotion. Language is a tool of understanding that does not fall under quantitative logic or social representation, contrary to the false ideas that you peddle. Saying or writing "man is mortal" does not exclude the possibility of dying for women!
It is not an egalitarian society that you are going to build, but a world of exclusion: a society where those who do not exhibit the outward signs of belonging to the inclusive camp such as midpoints, barbarisms that do not exist in French, lexical duplicates will have no place in the world that you claim to build.
You are adopting the behavior of someone who, having learned to read and write, has mastered his language enough to play with it in his own way, and thus makes his reputation and career in exercising contempt for a large number of learners with learning difficulties who will be further burdened by your practices. This is class contempt.
By doing so, you are propagating the intellectual and cultural balkanization of the French-speaking world.. Different identity groups also want to mark their identity through distinct signs such as the creation of neutral forms (iel for il/elle ; th for le/la). Do you encourage them? This causes an atomization of the language into so many communities based on linguistic, graphic and ideological separatisms. And you give them the green light.
Yana Grinshpun Linguist
Jean Giot, Linguist
François Rastier, Linguist
Xavier-Laurent Salvador, Linguist
Jean Szlamowicz, Linguist
for the Observatory of Decolonialism and Identity Ideologies
