by Ash Carter Ash Carter is a graduate student in French sociolinguistics at the University of Illinois. She wrote this blog post in 418 'Language and Minorities' in Spring 2019. In late February of this year, France became the last country in the French-speaking Western world to add feminine working-titles to their language repertoire after centuries of masculine-dominated professional titles. The French Academy, which serves as the executive body of French language policy and planning in France, decided to accept feminine work titles as ‘correct’ and suitable for ‘standard’ French. And this is news because…? Well, this is news because Belgium, Switzerland, and Canada all adopted feminization as early as 1979. The reluctance of the French to follow in the footsteps of francophonie in this matter in earlier years is explained by the Academy’s belief that the proposed changes to the language were ‘barbaric’. While former French president Jacques Chirac encouraged the mov...