openpolitics.com

The tournament is forcing a debate over the hidebound language and its rigidity over gender

PARIS—In all of his years as a player for the French national soccer team, followed by all of his years as a soccer announcer for France’s national TV station, Bixente Lizarazu never gave much thought to how he named the positions on the field.

Then came this year’s Women’s World Cup, held in France for the first time, and Mr. Lizarazu ran into the Byzantine rules of the French language.

More than five years after France was chosen to host the world’s biggest women-only sporting event—and four weeks after the tournament began—the country still can’t agree on what to call the players or managers.

As a romance language with masculine and feminine genders for nouns, French takes different turns depending on who or what is being discussed. Most jobs are constructed with masculine endings by default, with little guidance on how to refer to women in the profession. So what happens when that profession is international women’s soccer defender?

The language offers at least three options:

1. the masculine form défenseur,
2. the feminine form défenseuse,
3. or another feminine form défenseure,

which is pronounced exactly the same as the masculine. And if you follow French coverage of the tournament, you might see all three.

In Le Monde, you would read about a défenseuse or sélectionneuse (the word used for national team managers). A dispatch from Agence France-Presse, meanwhile, will say défenseure and sélectionneure. Television networks TF1 and Canal+, which are broadcasting the tournament here, often use one form in graphics on screen, but let commentators like Mr. Lizarazu employ another during live broadcasts.

“I prefer to use défenseuse, because it marks the feminine more clearly,” Mr. Lizarazu said. “I don’t think we were ever given a directive.”

Female commentators have landed on both sides of the question, with no clear preference for one construction from broadcast to broadcast.

This isn’t an issue in English, where a defender is a defender. Nor is it a problem for languages with clearer rules for feminine construction, such as German, where a female defender is quite simply an Abwehrspielerin.

This is France, however, a country that treats the intricacy of its language as a point of pride. When it comes to questions of proper usage, the country has its own ancient authority, the 384-year-old Académie Française. Its 35 members are known as the Immortals. They are charged with sporadically producing the definitive dictionary on usage and cutting through the babble of a constantly evolving tongue. They are even issued swords.

But time moves slowly at the Académie. In 1984, as more French speakers adapted their speech to reflect a growing number of women in the workplace, the Académie felt compelled to weigh in on the topic: It ruled out any changes, preferring to stick to the masculine form, except in cases where usage had already taken root. It was important to remember, the Académie argued at the time, that there was no connection between what it called “natural gender” and “grammatical gender.”

Three decades later, in 2014, the institution still wasn’t inclined to endorse any sweeping changes.

In February, a four-person committee of historians and writers produced a 20-page report on the matter. Noting a large spike in usage over the past 10 years, it stated that there was no problem, “in principle,” with creating feminine forms for job titles and descriptors in France. It helped that the committee found traces of the practice as far back as the Middle Ages.

 “We could disagree about the forms it would take, but opposing it no longer made any sense,” said Danièle Sallenave, an author and member of the Académie since 2011, who was on the committee.

So in a rare move for an institution normally as inflexible as a week-old baguette, the Académie said that it favored a more pragmatic approach to the question at this “time of linguistic instability.”

The question as it applies to soccer comes amid larger debates about gender equality at this World Cup, from the equal-pay lawsuit brought by several U.S. players against their own federation to issues of prize money. The winner of the Women’s World Cup will take home $4 million, while the men’s winner, France, got $38 million last year. That French didn’t have a standard construction for talking about the players during the tournament added an unforeseen twist.

The Académie says there isn’t necessarily a right or wrong answer. Although it spent over a page of its report discussing military ranks, it didn’t find room to go over positions on a soccer field. The committee made a point of not ruling on the tricky distinction between the “-eure” and “-euse” endings that crop up all over the game.

Jean-Pierre Colignon, a former chief copy editor at Le Monde, was more definitive, though he understood the conundrum.

“The hesitation doesn’t surprise me,” he said. “But I would say défenseuse is preferable….Simply put, more people say it. It’s also a cleaner distinction.”

Even the French national team, eliminated from the World Cup last week by the U.S., was stumped by the question when it hired manager Corinne Diacre in 2017. While Ms. Diacre, who has coached men’s and women’s sides during her career, is just “Corinne” to her players, the French federation needed to make a call one way or the other for official team communications. After much internal debate, it cautiously opted for sélectionneure.

“We asked the Académie and they didn’t make a call,” a spokesman said in French. “They’re waiting for the usage to settle itself.”

For broadcasters such as TF1’s play-by-play man Grégoire Margotton, it’s a matter of picking one and sticking to it. And when in doubt, he can always employ the French language’s favorite shortcut: English.

“Sometimes it’s just easier to say coach,” Mr. Margotton said. “That’s always just ‘coach.’ ”