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The basic form is lequel (le + quel; see French articles and determiners for information about each component). Both parts of lequel are inflected to agree with its referent in gender and number: hence, laquelle, lesquels, lesquelles. The prepositions à and de contract with le and les to form au, aux, du, and des, respectively; this is still ...
French personal pronouns (analogous to English I, you, he/she, we, and they) reflect the person and number of their referent, and in the case of the third person, its gender as well (much like the English distinction between him and her, except that French lacks an inanimate third person pronoun it or a gender neutral they and thus draws this distinction among all third person nouns, singular ...
LGBT+ rights advocates and feminists have argued in favour of the pronoun's use, arguing that it makes the language more inclusive and less sexist. [15] [16] [17] Some advocates have also raised concerns that lack of gender neutral options in French might force non-binary people to turn towards languages that do have more prominent gender neutral options instead, notably the English language.
Some (very rare) nouns change gender according to the way they are used: the words amour 'love' and délice 'pleasure' are masculine in singular and feminine in plural; the word orgue 'organ' is masculine, but when used emphatically in plural to refer to a church organ it becomes feminine (les grandes orgues); the plural noun gens 'people ...
To make words or phrases gender-inclusive, French-speakers use two methods. Orthographic solutions strive to include both the masculine and feminine endings in the word. Examples include hyphens (étudiant-e-s), middle dots (étudiant·e·s), [38] parentheses (étudiant(e)s), or capital letters (étudiantEs). The parentheses method is now often ...
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The same can happen in French with the epicene elided singular articles (l'), the definite (les) and indefinite (des) plural articles, and the contractions aux (à + les) and des (de + les) when in contact with the noun, so the adjective takes the task of marking the gender:
One must be aware, firstly, that word-final -x is a medieval shorthand for -us (in Old French people wrote chevax for chevaus, later written chevaux when the idea behind this -x was forgotten) (except in words like voix and noix where 's' was changed to 'x' by restoration of Latin usage (vox and nux)).