When an exam board for England, Wales and Northern Ireland recently clarified that students are now permitted to use gender-inclusive or gender-neutral forms in French, Spanish and German exams, it marked more than a technical adjustment to assessment criteria.

These updates highlight an important fact about the nature of languages. They are not fixed systems but evolving, social practices.

The exam board guidance has not been universally embraced. Allowing references to diverse gender identities is perceived by some opponents to be ideologically driven. It has also been criticised that these novel forms, such as the French gender-neutral pronoun “iel”, are not widely used or endorsed by authorities (yet).

These arguments surface some common misunderstandings of how languages work and what language education is for. Two fundamental insights of sociolinguistics – the academic discipline that studies language in its social contexts – are that languages are as diverse as the people who use them, and they are constantly changing and shifting.

The ‘rizz’ of languages

Languages are not neatly defined, unambiguous systems, but rather complex and dynamic. How we express ourselves is influenced by a range of factors including geographical regions, social aspects and identity, formality, medium and context – as well as individual preferences. Consider the differences between varieties of English........

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