The Human Rights League was “stunned” to discover the “archaic” and “dismaying” definitions in the Dictionary of the French Academy.
The Human Rights League (LDH) calls for “urgent rectification” of certain definitions present in the ninth edition of the Dictionary of the French Academy. In a press release, published this Tuesday, November 26, the association accuses the collection of 59,000 words of participating in an “at best archaic vision of our world”. On November 14, during an official ceremony, the dictionary was solemnly presented to Emmanuel Macron. Enough to fuel the “consternation” of the LDH which calls on Fayard editions to “take their responsibilities in the printed distribution of versions of this Dictionary”.
“The treatment of racism, fraught with issues in the world we live in”, is “staggering”, continues the association. As an example, she gives the definition of the word “race” which refers to “each of the large groups between which the human species is superficially distributed according to the distinctive physical characteristics which have been maintained or appeared in some and the others, due to their geographical isolation for prolonged periods. A man of black race, of white race, of yellow race. At the word “Yellow” we can also read that it is “a person or a population characterized in particular by the yellow or copper pigmentation of the skin, as opposed to White and Black”, the indignant LDH.
The association also notes the presence of the word “négrillon”, defined as “a small black child” and that of “negroid”, supposedly synonymous with a person possessing “certain of the morphological characteristics of black populations”. Overall, “no distance is marked with these entries, none of them is reported as discriminatory or pejorative”, indicates the human rights association.
And this is not the only register deemed “dismaying” by the association. Indeed, next to the word “woman” is affixed the following definition: “A human being defined by his sexual characteristics which allow him to conceive and give birth to children”, points out the LDH. “Should we conclude that an infertile or menopausal woman is not one?” she asks. Further on, in the entry defining heterosexuality as a “natural relationship between the sexes”, she underlines: “which implies that homosexuality is not natural”.
Contacted by Agence-France-Presse, the French Academy is still slow to respond. During its last press conference, it nevertheless announced that it was considering the possibility of modifying, in the online version, certain definitions without waiting for the re-examination of the word concerned, which normally is done from A to Z.