[ We are reproducing here the text of the response we published to Julien Bayou's article in L'Express ]

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 performative speech acts (although linguists don't 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 take so-and-so to be your husband?" But if you say, "Tomorrow everyone will be an environmentalist," you are engaging in incantation; not performance. If you declare today that you are a woman, you will not magically change your physical condition. You are free to believe that; but it is our duty to remind you that no, not everything is performative.

Another point seems important: there is no correlation between femicides and the use of gender in language. For example, there is no gender in Farsi, but the number of honor killings in Iran is much higher than in France, where the language does have gender distinctions. There is no grammatical gender in English, but it is not certain that English women are unfortunately less victims of violence than French women. Reading your work, one learns that the strange form used by inclusivists, "tou.s.tes" (all), is supposedly a miracle cure. But this is false. Furthermore, we would like to inform you that studies by the now-defunct National Observatory of Crime noted that "those convicted of homicide of a minor under 15 are predominantly women." Have you considered the consequences of this "visibility"? Will you be referring to them as "assassins"? What would the cause of women gain from "making visible" the murdered? The Nazis? The perpetrators? You speak of invisibility. That's a metaphor! Language doesn't actually "make visible" anything or anyone, and it's not an instrument for promoting identity. Language is a tool of understanding that doesn't operate according to quantitative logic or social representation, contrary to the false ideas you're spreading. Saying or writing "man is mortal" doesn't preclude the possibility of death 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 acting in this way, you are propagating the intellectual and cultural balkanization of the Francophonie . Different identity groups also wish to mark their identity with distinct signs, such as the creation of neutral forms ( iel for il / elle ; lea for le / la ). Are you encouraging them? This is causing the language to fragment into numerous communities based on linguistic, graphic, and ideological separatism. And you are giving 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