Help With Non-Binary Pronouns in French?
Help With Non-Binary Pronouns in French?
I know, I know. It's complicated, and maybe impossible. A lot needs to change to make this easy, and I'm certainly in no position to revolutionize the French language.
I need to add French pronouns to my email signature. I don't necessarily need to use them, but ideally I could explain to someone how to use them in a sentence.
"Iel" isn't perfect, but it's the most popular right now. That's good enough for me.
I'm confused about the rest. Can anyone give me guidance on the most popular Iel equivalent of [il/le/lui] and [elle/la/elle]?
Is there a good website where I can see the pronouns in use, that isn't a style guide about pronouns?
Thanks for stopping by :)
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Hi! We actually tend more to use il, elle and iel, rather than il/lui, elle/elle, and iel/iel, because as you can see from this sentence, it's pretty useless to add the accusative form which only changes for "il". For instance, my email signature and what I have here only references il. For convenience I put they, il here, but in my email signature I have: "they/them, il".
And yes, non-binary options in English are underwhelming to say the least, which is why I use il and not a neutral alternative :(
English is pretty good when it comes to nonbinary/gender neutral language compared to French, right? I mean neopronouns aren't that unheard of and we still have They/them being grammatically accepted
Yep, and your grammar is largely ungendered. Our nouns and adjectives almost all are, so it's really hard to avoid gendering people too.
Spanish has the same problem. Even if a word is gender neutral (e.g. president) you still have to use a gendered pronoun for it. And some politicians are even trying to mske that word, one of the few that are not gendered, be gendered.
Thank you SO much for your answers here! And for writing that awesome Wikipedia page, which I somehow hadn't seen before. A few follow up questions, if you don't mind:
- I found a dropdown somewhere with [iel/iel/iel]. This is a mistake, right? "Je iel connais" feels wrong. It should be something like "Je lae connais"?
- You may have answered this already, but what's a good way to present my pronouns that says "I prefer non-binary, but I don't want to torture you so feel free to use il or elle? Something like [iel ou il, lui, le]? Useful point about accusative being unneccessary, but I'm in a situation where other people are adding it so I think I probably need to include it...
- Definitely wrong!
- I'd say (iel préféré, elle/il acceptés) might do the trick?