Should we be yelling at ‘iel’?
Every year in November, France eagerly awaits the Beaujolais Nouveau and the new edition of the reference dictionary of French: Le Robert. As New York Times wine critic Eric Asimov wrote: “Beaujolais is a far more relaxed wine than Bordeaux. Don’t worry about decanting, or serving it in the perfect glass. It’s versatile with food.” Indeed, the French have a relaxed attitude with respect to this cheap wine. The release of the Beaujolais Nouveau is the opportunity for a light-hearted, yet nationwide, debate on whether it has a banana, strawberry, or raspberry aftertaste. The publication of the dictionary triggers another kind of debate, one that is not so relaxed. You can joke about cheap wine all you want, but you can’t joke about the national language.1
On November 16th 2021, the editors of Le Robert included the gender-inclusive pronoun ‘iel’ in its online 2022 edition (Dico en Ligne).

‘Iel’ is a neologism, and other spelling variants exist, e.g. : yel or ielle. It is considered gender inclusive because it is conflates the masculine pronoun il ‘he’ and its feminine counterpart elle ‘she’. Iel has not yet been ratified by the Académie Française (a highly conservative French council for matters pertaining to the French language), and won’t be for a while. While the everyday use of iel is largely anecdotal for now, conservative critics deem it a linguistic provocation that must be banned.
In the immediate aftermath of the online publication, Le Robert editors were accused of wokeism by French MP François Jolivet, of La République en Marche, the party founded by current French President Emmanuel Macron. Mr Jolivet’s main complaint is summarized in an official letter reproduced below. The letter is addressed to Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, the current president of the Académie Française. Note that Mrs. Carrère d’Encausse’s official title Secrétaire perpétuel de l’Académie Française ‘Permanent Secretary of the French Academy’ is in the masculine, i.e. purposely not in a gender-inclusive form. According to Mr Jolivet, this type of initiative sullies French, and ends up dividing its users instead of bringing them together.

Mr Jolivet’s protest was supported by then French Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer, who tweeted that “Inclusive writing is not the future of the French language.” He added that “Our students, who are consolidating their basic knowledge, cannot have that as a reference.”
Le Robert’s director denied any activist motive, saying its specialists had noted a rise in the use of iel for several months. The week after the online publication, I went to my local bookstore (by the way, they are wonderful, if you ever visit Paris, make sure you pay them a visit) and looked up iel in the print edition. I could not find it, which suggests that Le Robert are well aware that their print edition has a different attitude with respect to the exposition of the baseline of language standards. The paper version seems to lag behind the online edition, which is more flexible as far as neologisms are concerned. Chief editor Charles Bimbenet explained Le Robert did not want to promote ‘wokeism‘: “[i]t seemed useful to specify its meaning for people who come across it, whether they want to use it or, on the contrary, reject it. Defining the words at use in the world helps us to better understand it.”
Iel in particular and gender-inclusive markers in general (the use of ‘neutral’ pronouns they/them in English, the interpunct in French, the ‘neutral’ morpheme x in Spanish, such as nosotrxs instead of nosotros/nosotras, etc.) are interesting because they oppose two camps (naively: conservatives vs. activists). Both kinds instantiate change from above. Often, change from above is considered to begin in the speech of educated people, or people with a high social prestige. With respect to inclusive writing, social prestige does not seem to be a discriminating factor as both camps are educated.
From Twitter to Amazon
Out of curiosity, I read the reviews of Le Robert on Amazon. I was immediately struck by the low ratings, only three stars for the favorite dictionary of the French. Note that this is the print edition, i.e. the one without iel.

This piqued my curiosity and prompted me to read the reviews. A few clicks later, tadaaa!

If you do not speak French, let me translate the titles of the reviews for you. From top to bottom, we have: “Poor dictionary”, “Leftist propaganda manual”, and “Not recommended for school or university use”. The prose is clearly declinist and typical of far-right trolling. According to them, the French language is going to hell because French civilization is in decline (sic). One reviewer is a good case in point. He has left the same review and the same poor rating for all editions of the dictionary. In contrast, he gave five stars to far-right presidential candidate Éric Zemmour’s racist pamphlet (he nicknames Zemmour “the French Trump”). Another reviewer gives the dictionary only one star but is generous enough to grant five stars to former far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen’s memoirs.

The reviewer below has only written a total of three reviews: one for a phone case, another one for the dictionary, and yet another one for… a gun safe!

In contrast, the reviews written by lovers of the French language all over the world are quite good.

From gender-inclusive pronouns to gender-inclusive morphemes
Last semester, I invited the students in my sociolinguistics course at Paris 8 University to approach the debate with the tools that they learned in class. In other words, I asked them to leave their preferences aside (some of them use iel as a token of their activism, others reject iel on political grounds) and reflect upon gender-inclusive variables from the angle of objective science. I gave them Burnett & Pozniak (2021) to read. The authors’ goal was to conduct “a large quantitative corpus study of the (non)use of EI in Parisian undergraduate brochures.” Using a corpus of undergraduate brochures in twelve Parisian universities, they extracted all occurrences of the noun/adjective étudiant ‘student’, whose masculine/feminine alternation invites the use of inclusive morphemes, i.e. the interpunct étudiant·e, parentheses étudiant(e), the dash étudiant-e, the slash étudiant/e, the period étudiant.e, or repetition étudiant et étudiante. Burnett and Pozniak found that the period is neutral, the interpunct the most activist form, and parentheses are the least activist marker (for a full account, read Section 4.2.3 of the paper). Stratification is at work, based on several effects, the main ones being the prestige attached to each university, the discipline, and gender parity.
I expected my university (Paris 8) to rank first with respect to the use of the interpunct (‘point médian’), but I was wrong. The most activist institution is clearly Paris Nanterre University (‘Paris 10’), which happens to be the one that hosts my lab.

I asked my student to replicate Burnett and Pozniak’s methodology on undergraduate brochures in sociology at non-Parisian universities. We expected to find many occurrences of inclusive writing because in this discipline, both faculty and students are traditionally pro-activist. Instead, the students found very few instances of étudiant·e, with the interpunct. We suspect place to be a significant factor in the distribution of gender-inclusive morphemes. We shall test this hypothesis next semester.
I cannot help but be amazed at how much societal chaos a single word can cause. Of course, conscious changes (those that emanate from institutions, socially dominant groups, and pressure groups) can inflect the spread of a word or expression, but at the end of the day, I am convinced that collective usage below the level of consciousness prevails. At least, that is what my experience as a usage-based linguist has taught me. For this reason, it is hard to predict how linguistic units spread across communities of speakers.
Reference
Burnett, H., & Pozniak, C. (2021). Political dimensions of gender inclusive writing in Parisian universities. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 25(5), 808-831. Full paper.
- Due to a very busy year, I began writing this post last Fall but did not have time to finish it until now. Here it is, at last. [↩]
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OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Guillaume Desagulier (July 4, 2022). Should we be yelling at ‘iel’? Around the word. Retrieved May 21, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/n4v9


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