Linguae Europaeae

Image by Ted Eytan/Creative Commons  ( https://www.flickr.com/photos/taedc/27937114851 )  by Amy John Amy John (she/her) is a recent University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign graduate with a double major in French Studies and Psychology. She plans to continue using French and to pursue a career in social work or a social work adjacent field. She wrote this blog post for 418 “Languages and Minorities in Europe” in Spring 2023. So, what is “iel” and why is it important? “Iel” is the French version of the English singular gender-neutral pronoun “they.” It is a combination of “il” (he) and “elle” (she) (Wagener, 2021). “Iel” and “they” are important for similar reasons. It helps us refer to people when we don’t know their gender without assuming their gender. Often, “he” or “il” are the automatic pronouns used to refer to an unknown person. For example, board game instructions often explain the game in terms of “he” as opposed to “they.” Doing this excludes everyone who doesn’t ...

By Robin Wilson Adapted from Wikimedia The debate about the feminine form of certain words of profession in the Italian language, specifically job titles, was brought back to the fore with the election of Virginia Raggi, the newly-elected mayor of Rome. She is, in fact, the first ever female mayor of Rome. With her election came the question of whether the word sindaco ‘mayor’ would be used to describe her as occupying the position of the major. Until recently, sindaco had no widely recognized feminine form in the Italian language. The dominant use of masculine words for titles and professions within the Italian language, however, is not a new phenomenon. Attitudes and inequalities associated with such a dominance was raised as early as 1987 by the researcher and activist Alma Sabatini in her influential treatise Raccomandazioni per un uso non sessista della lingua italiana ‘Recommendations for a non-sexist use of the Italian language’. Although Sabatini’s recommendations we...