Féminisation linguistique et écriture inclusive: de quelques nouvelles formes langagières du français

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From the 17th century to the present day, the French language has often been the subject of controversies relating to the development of its grammar or its lexicon. The one we are interested in in this article is relatively recent – at least it has expanded in recent years, in the wake of the MeToo movement, in 2017. In France, recent studies on the subject testify to the interest shown in the question, but also to the profound differences regarding the functions of these “new” language forms. The evolution of society is expressed in language, and conversely the language register the transformations of society. Drawing on the reflections of Alpheratz (2018), Cerquiglini (2018) and Viennot (2018), we will first present the different stages of these transformations of the French language, the moments of “tension” around the issue of gender in language, as well as the “principles” of inclusive language. Then, from a corpus of around 200 university emails, we will analyze some of these new language forms in use in this textual genre.