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Convergence et divergence dans l'emploi de termes communs recommandés par l'Office de la langue française /
Abstract
Thèse (M.A.)--Université Laval, 1994. Bibliogr.: f. [120]-123.
... In comparison, French, Belgian and Swiss participants responded negatively to these questions. Similarly, Tremblay (1994) finds in a survey of Québécois speakers that, while they generally prefer endogenous terms (that is, terms organically or spontaneously arising in Quebec) to those created by the OQLF, they respect the work of the OQLF and hold a positive attitude towards the French spoken in Quebec. This positive atitude towards their own variety of French has been growing stronger, a phenomenon that has been documented in multiple studies since then (Pöll 2005;Maurais 2008;Chalier 2019Chalier , 2018Pustka et al. 2019;Sebková et al. 2020). ...
In this article, we document the gender of the noun “COVID-19” in a database of more than 76,000 tweets and in traditional media (approximately 500,000 articles) in French as spoken in Africa, (North) America and Europe. We find that North American media comply near-categorically with the recommendations of the feminine by the World Health Organization and local linguistic authorities in March 2020. The majority of North American tweets follow suit soon after. The African data show an increase of articles and tweets adopting the feminine after the Académie française's recommendation in May 2020. Finally, the feminine is negligible in the European data. We argue that among the factors at play are dialect-specific differences in French gender and loanword adaptation; the complex relationship among linguistic authorities, the public, and local media; and the relative delay in the Académie française's recommendation of the feminine.
... In comparison, French, Belgian and Swiss participants responded negatively to these questions. Similarly, Tremblay (1994) finds in a survey of Québécois speakers that, while they generally prefer endogenous terms (that is, terms organically or spontaneously arising in Québec) to those created by the OQLF, they respect the work of the OQLF and hold a positive attitude towards the French spoken in Québec. To our knowledge, little has been written on the attitudes of African French speakers towards the Académie Française, although language policy has largely proven ineffectual, according to Spolsky (2018, p. 71): ...
In this paper, we trace the evolution from February to June 2020 of the gender of the noun "COVID-19" in French with respect to two databases: first, a Twitter database of nearly 78,000 tweets and second, a database of traditional media of approximately 500,000 articles. Each database considers only gender-marked instances of the term "COVID-19," and our corpora are tagged for geographical origin in order to compare and contrast varieties of French as spoken in three continents, namely Africa, (North) America and Europe. We find that American media comply categorically and immediately with the recommendations of the feminine by the World Health Organization and various local (Canadian) linguistic authorities in early March 2020. More than 50% of tweets in the American data follow suit soon after. African media is similar in that a large number of articles and tweets adopt the feminine, but only coinciding with the recommendation of the feminine by the Académie Française in early May 2020. Finally, we find negligible use of the feminine in the European data. We argue that several factors are likely at play in these results, namely, dialect-specific tendencies in loanword adaptation and the French gender system, the relationship between linguistic authorities and local media, public attitudes towards linguistic authority and the relative time of the recommendations made by these linguistic authorities.
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