"[6][7] In April 2018, a group of doctoral students lobbied for the standard usage of "iel" along with other gender neutral language at the Université du Québec à Montréal.
[11] That year, the Office québécois de la langue française advised against standard usage of "iel" and other gender neutral neologisms, proposing instead that writers avoid using gender-specific terms when possible.
[12] In January 2021, Canadian national broadcaster Radio-Canada announced that it had formed a committee to discuss including "iel" and using écriture inclusive (fr; gender-neutral language) in its style guide.
[18][19] According to Kiki Kosnick of Augustana College: While some neologisms have not yet taken off, the personal pronoun iel (pronounced [jɛl]; sometimes written yel) is indeed surfacing as a promising alternative to il and elle.
At the same time, the phonetic and orthographic similarity iel shares with il and elle allows interlocutors and readers to easily recognise it as a third-person subject pronoun.
[24] Mathieu Goux of the University of Caen Normandy has argued that the French language is often viewed "with the idea that it should never change" and that the "iel" has seen resistance similar to Verlan.
"[27] Gwenaëlle Perrier of the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers has called debates over the pronoun "a pretext" that "allows the normalisation of anti-feminist discourse.