Gender-inclusive speaking: a quantitative study of noun phrases referring to humans in a corpus of spoken French

This contribution presents the first quantitative study of gender-inclusive language in spoken French, based on a corpus of sociolinguistic interviews conducted in Montreal, Paris, and Marseille with feminist and queer activists. Focusing on noun phrases referring to human beings, we quantify the proportion of generic masculines in the corpus and analyze the various strategies used by the speakers to avoid them. Results show that the overall rate of use of masculine-marked expressions whose intended referents are not necessarily men is extremely low (around 5 % of all the noun phrases in the corpus). We show that this result arises from three unrelated sources: differences between the spoken and standard written language, use of person-centered language, and replacement of so-called generic masculines with syntactic doublets.