France is continuing to crackdown on far-left attempts to make the country woke by banning the use of gender-neutral language in schools, saying that the push was a threat to the French language altogether and could push people to learn English instead.
“The country’s education ministry issued the ruling last week after a push to include full stops in the middle of written words – dubbed ‘midpoints’ – which allow both male and female forms to be represented simultaneously,” The Daily Mail reported. “In French grammar, nouns take on the gender of the subject to which they refer, with male preferred over female in mixed settings.”
The Académie Française, a nearly 400-year-old institution that guards the French language, pushed back on the attempt to make the language woke, saying that it is “harmful to the practice and understanding of [French.]”
Nathalie Elimas, the State Secretary for Priority Education, said on Thursday that the attempts to make the language woke were “a danger for our country” and “the death knell for the use of French in the world.”
Elimas said that the move would not make the language more popular and instead would drive people to learn English instead. “‘With the spread of inclusive writing, the English language – already quasi-hegemonic across the world – would certainly and perhaps forever defeat the French language,” she said.