What’s in a word? How less-gendered language is faring across Europe

A contentious vote in the French senate is only the latest battleground in the culture war over inclusive language

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”.