Gender representation in French Eurolect: An open dialogue between supranational and national legal varieties

Abstract

The issue of gender-fair language remains rather controversial in France. Although some recent changes have taken place at institutional level, forms associated with inclusive writing are still discouraged in numerous legal settings. Inspired by the broader research framework of the Eurolect Observatory Project,1 which focuses on the cross-language contact that derives from the multilingual drafting and translation of EU legislation, this paper investigates the possible dialogue between supranational and national legal varieties and the way(s) in which the topical issue of gender is addressed in French legal provisions. Based on qualitative and quantitative analysis of a corpus consisting of (i) EU directives, (ii) their implementing measures in the French national legal system, and (iii) French national laws, the study investigates different linguistic strategies for expressing gender, which can be categorised under the tripartite division of masculine, binary, or neutral forms. This contribution joins an existing body of recent literature on the discursive articulation of gender in legislative languages (Cavagnoli and Mori, 2019) and narrows down the focus to gender-related provisions in the French language. The analysis is guided by the following research questions: Can a potential intralinguistic dialogue be observed between supranational and national varieties in French legal discourse? And if so, can such a potential dialogue be said to be moving towards (more) gender-fair representation in the law?