The Académie Française, founded in the 17th century under Louis XIV, views itself as the guardian of the French language – but a group of linguists says the words the institution chooses to protect or refuses to admit to its prestigious dictionary reveal an ideological bias.
What's in a word? In France, plenty.
So much so that since 1635 the Académie Française has been solemnly watching over the purity and eloquence of the language, and deliberating which words can or cannot be admitted to its official dictionary.
First published in 1694, there have been around two editions per century ever since. The ninth edition, published in mid-November, is the fruit of nearly four decades of painstaking deliberation by the academy's language commission.
Its ten members meet every Thursday to work their way through the alphabet, at the rate of around one letter every 18 months.
"You ensure that language is used properly," President Emmanuel Macron told the members of the academy – known as immortels – as he was ceremoniously handed a copy of the dictionary on 14 November. "The pace at which you produce your dictionary prevents you from giving in to the temptations of fads and trends. You strike a subtle balance in being of your time without giving in to your era."
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But for some, that steady pace means the dictionary is already outdated. "The effort is praiseworthy, but so excessively tardy that it is perfectly useless," a group of linguists wrote in an open letter on the day the four-volume tome was published.
"The first volume is obsolete and in the second volume, published in 2000, you still read that the euro is the prospective currency of the European Union and that the franc is the currency used in France," said Florent Moncomble, a member of the group Les Linguistes Atterrés ("The Appalled Linguists"). "So it can't be relevant for somebody who wants to learn what French is at the moment of reading the dictionary."
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Legitimacy in question
The dictionary commission consults lexicographers, but counts none among its ranks.
Moncomble says this means it lacks legitimacy in compiling a dictionary, but the academy defends its methodology.
"It's a collaborative effort," said writer and journalist Frederic Vitoux, immortel number 15 and a member of the language commission since 2003. "Linguists are not necessarily the best placed to make a dictionary. What's important is to love the French language. We're writers, historians, doctors, scientists... working together to find the best possible definition of a word."
Vitoux recognises that the definition of euro is outdated and is one of "around 60 words" that will need to be updated in the tenth edition, which they've already started working on.
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The ninth edition has 21,000 more entries than the previous one, with new terms including zapping, top model and risotto – but not smartphone or web.
Moncomble, who, along with his colleagues, has been combing through the new edition, says there are major issues not just with outdated definitions but with the choice of entries.
"They say that it's a dictionary based on usage. So how do we explain that words that are very current in today's French, such as le web are absent. But they've decided to include woke and wokisme, which are probably less frequent in people's day to day usage of the language."
And while wokisme is flagged as "sometimes pejorative", woke is not.
"So what do they base their choices on? Certainly not objective observation of usage, but more probably subjective choices, impressions. And I don't know, perhaps ideological," added Moncomble.
For Vitoux, the controversy is a “pointless quarrel”.
“The French language is evolving, but not through the diktat of a few progressives,” he said. "New ideas, for example gender theory, will give rise to new words and the academy is attentive to that. But the French language doesn’t belong to the Académie Française, nor to the Appalled Linguists, it belongs to no one, it belongs to us all.”
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Gender bias
French is a gendered language, and the academy long resisted the move towards the feminisation of professions.
The new dictionary does include feminine forms of job titles such as professeur and ambassadeur but, as Moncomble points out, "an ambassadrice is the wife of an ambassador, and certainly not a female ambassador, and préfète is similarly the wife of a préfet".
However others, such as sénatrice, do not have their own entries and are simply "bundled in with senateur. And if you look for chirurgienne [female surgeon] you'll end up on the page chirurgien, and there's a footnote saying that following the Académie's decision to accept feminine words in 2019, the word is now in use."
It wasn't until the eighth edition that a femme (woman) became a human being rather than a man's counterpart. And the current definition still links her to child-bearing, leaving infertile and post-menopausal woman out of the loop.
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Then there's the word fellation, which features in the latest edition, but not the term cunnilingus.
Vitoux says he has “no idea” why the male form of oral sex was prioritised, but considers his predecessors were “wrong” not to have included both terms.
“In my opinion the word cunnilingus will feature in the 10th edition. And when it does, we will see that the term only entered the dictionary in the early 21st century, whereas fellation appeared earlier. It's interesting – it's as if there was a sort of macho ideology in the intellectual conscience of the French in not recognising the word cunnilingus."
'Downright problematic'
Vitoux emphasises the unique nature of a dictionary which charts the evolution of the French language since the 17th century to the present day. "It's an incredible resource, all nine editions are available online, for free, and accessible by anyone all over the world," he enthused.
Moncomble acknowledges the dictionary is of historical interest to people who are interested in the history of language in France, but says that "it's a historical document about the Académie itself, not so much about the French language".
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Browsing the nine dictionaries online is certainly eye-opening. "You find out that a word such as mongolisme was actually introduced in the ninth edition, with a definition linked with mental retardation," Moncomble noted. "They actively put it there, in the 21st century, with no mention about mongolisme being obsolete and offensive."
He also points to the definition of heterosexual pertaining to the "natural" sexuality between people of opposite sexes, and jaune (yellow) being attributed strong racial connotations with no mention of these now being considered offensive.
"You might say some definitions may be a bit obsolete in a quaint way, but this is downright problematic," he said.
The group of linguists are calling for such terms to be modified in the online version and that the publisher of the print version should include an addendum indicating terms that are now considered obsolete or offensive.
