Feminitives in Russian and French: on the issue of gender connotation

This article is devoted to the problem of feminization of masculine nouns in French and Russian, which is important for achieving gender neutrality, i.e. equality of masculine and feminine words. The relevance of this problem lies in the fact that ambiguous ideas are quite often put into practice through words that are not familiar to our ears. Some examples in Russian are such words as «блогерка» (a female blogger), «авторка» (a female author), «профессорка» (a female professor), and others. And in French, la préfète, la magistrate, la députée and others. The authors of the article touch upon the issue of linguistic political correctness in relation to discriminated communities, or those considered discriminated: women, people of non-traditional sexual orientation, national, racial and religious minorities. There is also much discussion nowadays about people with disabilities The best example of how to erase the boundaries between the sexes in the Russian language is the word comrade. The work draws attention to the fact that the feminist community is not unanimous, since not everyone is in favor of feminitives. On the one hand, there is a group of radical feminists, and on the other, their opponents, who are definitely against innovations. In addition, we should not forget the majority of native speakers who speak at their convenience. The results of the study lead to the conclusion that if feminitives are regularly used, especially in the media and social networks, the society can get used to them very quickly. In other words, feminitives can penetrate the language if our life changes.