Italy’s Ministry of Education ordered all schools nationwide to ban gender-neutral symbols like the asterisk (*) and the schwa (ə), an inverted “e” that activists used to replace masculine and feminine word endings in Italian.

The ministry was blunt: “The use of non-compliant graphic signs is contrary to linguistic norms and risks compromising the clarity and uniformity of institutional communication.” In Italian, like Spanish, nouns and adjectives take masculine or feminine forms. And Meloni’s government decided that’s how it stays.

The Accademia della Crusca, the institution that has guarded the Italian language for centuries, had already suggested avoiding these symbols in official documents. Meloni’s party, Brothers of Italy, consistently pushes legislation to protect the language and cement its status as the country’s only official language.