'Françaises, Français': Why the French language need not be so sexist

[Emrys]

5. "Gender" in linguistic terms is just a semantic/grammatical label.

German, for instance, has three - masculine, feminine and neuter, taking the articles der, die and das and with adjectives and the case system needing to agree according to rules that native speakers internalize and we who learn it as a second language have to consciously and laboriously memorize.

Grammatical gender is not necessarily related to physical gender. A table in French is feminine. Girl - Mädchen - in German is neuter because the diminutive ending -chen (and associated modification of the preceing vowel) always renders a noun neuter.

From reading the aritcle, this doesn't seem to be the issue. If you speak French to a native speaker and mistakenly use "le" (masculine) as the article for a feminine noun (instead of "la" ), they'll probably immediately correct you as it's illiterate/non-standard. I don't think the proposal is to abandon grammatical gender. English, as one example, went through this transition in its development and became effectively a different language, and French without gendered nouns would also be a different language.

It looks like the controversy is more around problems that are not unique to French. "Man" is used to refer to a male in English, but also mankind, and some have objected to this over the years. Some years ago there was a drive in America to replace some gendered job terms with ungendered ones - firefighter instead of fireman, for instance, and this was a matter of law in certain contexts.

English has ungendered plurals, French doesn't, which is one aspect that is being challenged, if you read the article. I remember wandering along a French country lane with my wife a few years ago. We passed a few roadside cottages with women outside, two groups of which greeted us with a cheery "Bonjour, mesdames." I wasn't sure at the time (still haven't been able to find out, in fact) whether I was being misgendered or whether they had a local dialect way of overcoming the lack of an ungendered plural form - formally, it should have been "Bonjour, messieurs," which is one of the issues being disputed in the controversy being reported here.