French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe has ordered that so-called "inclusive writing" - an attempt to make French grammar more politically correct and gender neutral - must not be used in official government texts.

The ban was the latest twist in a bitter row over "écriture inclusive,” which splits up words using a punctuation point called a middot, so that for example the plural word “amis” (friends) becomes “ami·e·s” and “citoyens” (citizens) becomes “citoyen·ne·s.”

The new spellings include feminine forms rather than following the rule that plural masculine endings denote both women and men - a practice that the French ministry for gender equality has described as a form of sexual tyranny.

But the initiative has sparked fury among linguistic purists, with the Académie Française, the gatekeeper of the French language, arguing that it poses a “mortal danger” to the purity of French.

The Prime Minister has now come down on the side of the purists, banning “inclusive writing” from official publications.