The latest skirmish in the culture war over inclusive language has been playing out this week in France, where the senate voted in favour of a proposal to ban the use of less-gendered terms in official documents.
Les Républicains, the centre-right party behind the move, had claimed that inclusive neologisms such as iel – a mix of the male and female pronouns il and elle – and more general efforts to end the entrenched masculine bias in French were part of an “ideology that endangers the clarity of our language”.
