La terminologie religieuse orthodoxe en langue française et la féminisation

The present paper proposes an analysis of the feminisation process of nouns indicating female functions, activities and occupations at the level of what we called the Christian-Orthodox religious terminology, individualised in the French language. We work on a corpus of written sources, with referential specificity of this type, completed also by oral sources. We will show that the users of the French Orthodox terminology are not resistant to the implementation of the feminisation process, accomplished with the linguistic, especially derivational material that French provides them, and that they do not possess prescriptive linguistic imaginaries in this regard. (HoudebineGravaud, 1998: 12). The conclusion concerning the rather hesitant feminisation of this terminology is simply due to a slightly unbalanced distribution of the ecclesiastical roles and functions, far fewer in Orthodoxy in the case of women.