A very nice study by Gygax et al. (2008) on the influence of the of the masculine form (allegedly) intended as generic on the representation of gender in language: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01690960701702035 "This finding has critical social implications, especially in relation to the acknowledgement of women in society. We believe that our results show that the so-called generic use of the masculine biases gender representations in a way that is discriminatory to women. This is especially true as French and German newspapers still display some job announcements in the masculine form, therefore, we believe, suggesting that women are not suitable candidates. In 2002, the Académie Française deemed it necessary to publish a document stating that the use of the masculine as generic was totally gender-open and that using different grammatical forms was unnecessary. Our findings demonstrate that the Académie Française have clearly underestimated the influence of the masculine form in leading readers towards a male representation." #AcadémieFrançaise #MasculinGénérique #Epicène #EcritureInclusive #GenderNeutral @psycholinguistics
Actually, I could start a list of scientific publication in @psycholinguistics highlighting the level of ingnorance exhibited by #AcadémieFrançaise. It is quite rare that scientists make political statements in their articles, but this institution is such a joke... Here's an excerpt from a paper by Xiao, Strickland and Peperkamp (@cognition_ens):
"In its solemn declaration, L’Académie Française admonished French society for the idea of “inclusive writing” (meant is the mid-dot form), warning people about its potential to estrange future generations from France’s written heritage, undermine the status of French as a world language, and even put French in mortal danger [...] Societal debates notoriously take place without reference to empirical evidence. Yet, there is a growing body of experimental work assessing the interpretation of both the generic use of the masculine form and gender-fair alternatives."
#MasculinGénérique #Epicène #ecritureinclusive (maybe also @laelia_ve @MarCandea)
