The Académie Française, the top French council that sets the standards for the country’s language, has been asked by a leading human rights organization to amend several racist, bigoted and outdated entries in its latest official French dictionary. The Ligue des droits de l’homme (LDH) wrote Tuesday that it found “with amazement and dismay that many definitions are part of a vision of our world that is at best archaic.” Among them: the word “yellow” (jaune) is said to be okay to refer to people of certain races, heterosexuality is defined as a “natural” relationship between sexes but homosexuality is not, while multiple outdated slurs which refer to Black people are not defined as discriminatory or pejorative. Meanwhile, a woman is described as a human “defined by her sexual characteristics that allow her to conceive and give birth to children,” which the LDH said would exclude sterile and menopausal women. “The French language deserves better,” wrote the LDH. A spokesperson for the Académie Française told the Daily Beast the organization has no comment.
