French is a tough, misogynist language.
French is a terribly frustrating language to learn. It’s full of exceptions and idioms… Most of our rules make no sense, have edge cases, or are relics of the past. I pity anyone foolish enough to try learn french.
Then we have an overly conservative “french academy” that loves nothing more than to keep french as scholarly as possible. Here a little known fact, most famous french writers were struggling with french too. That is because, as a language, French is kept closer to the academic circles than the common folks. It isn’t meant to be useful, it is meant to be studied.
That is, unless you switch to the dark side of french, and go to learn Quebecois. If you ask me, Quebecois is a completely different language. But I have to admit, it’s one that is a lot more practical and closer to how you ordinarily speak.
Anyway, I could go on endlessly on that topic, and maybe I will in a future article. My point here is that I always thought myself fortunate that french was my mother tongue, because I never had to “figure out” french; it always felt kind of natural. One thing in particular that never ceases to amaze me is how very harmless french words can actually be very rude insults in the wrong context, but I will come back to that later.
On top of that, french is a two-genders language. That is, every word is either masculine of feminine. There is no neutral gender like in English. This adds a lot of confusion as the rule to determine what is masculine or feminine are mostly fuzzy and hand-wavy. This led to a situation that I encountered quite a lot of while discussing with non-native speakers. For the sake of the example, let’s say I am discussing with my friends Frank and Anne. Frank is learning French, and Anne is just a common friend of us. Usually what happens is that Frank comes up with a new french word he just learned. For the sake of this example, let’s say it’s “cloche” (that is, “a bell” in English). I explain what “cloche” is and tell him that it is, for some obscure reason, a feminine word. Then I quickly add that he shouldn’t, in any case, compare Anne to a cloche, because it is a very rude thing in French.
At first that was funny, especially when it kept happening, then I realized something. Most feminine nouns were, one way or the other, an insult to woman in some ways. At best, they were neutral or wouldn’t make sense when applied to a woman. Very few carried a positive sentiment (“perle” and “fleur”, is a notable exception to that), and when it was the case, the word could usually be applied to men and woman both. On the contrary, most masculine nouns are generally positive, especially when applied to a man.
It is well known that most languages are gender-biased. Because they reflect the thoughts of the dominant group in a society, and because our society has been mostly ruled by men in our recent history, there is sometimes a huge difference in meaning between the masculine and feminine version of the same word. The textbook example of that being “Doctor”, which is usually associated with masculinity where Nurse is seen as a more feminine profession. What peculiar with french is that a word like “cloche” is not intrinsically related to female. It’s a feminine noun, but it has nothing to do with femininity. Yet if you say of a woman that she is a “cloche” it is an insult. And from my experience it holds true for a lot of words.
Now, I am no linguist, far from it actually. And I may just have a bias here (which, in that case, says a lot about how I apparently associate feminine words with pejorative terms, but that’s another story…) but I find this interesting. From what I could read here and there the gender issues of french (as any language) had been studied and discussed before, but mostly in regards to how similar words ended up having different meaning when applied to man or woman. The literature on around that issue is very interesting (see, for instance, “Les mots et les femmes” from Marina Yaguello) and I can only recommend you to dive in the topic. But I have yet to find a study on the intrinsic connotation of a common noun with respect to its genre.
Language is the medium of thought and reason. It says a lot about our society when our language has such deeply ingrained biases. When most thing feminine can be used as insult and most things masculine as praises; one could argue that it is not far from psychological conditioning. It also says a lot about how far we have to go to simply put both genders on an equal footing.
In the meantime, here’s a rule of thumb for all you french learner there: if it’s feminine, you could probably use it as an insult !
As a closing note, at the risk of being polemical, I believe it is worth noting that, despite it all, we shouldn’t confuse cause and effect. If anything, our tongue is a mirror of our mind and social constructs. Imposing changes to a flawed language won’t work unless you also change the root cause for these biases in the first place. Words fall out of fashion all the time, not because some scholars decided it, but because they no longer make sense. Trying to voluntarily retire words, or concepts (as much as trying to enforce the usage of old ones) is but admitting our own incapacity to infuse changes at a more meaningful level.
