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Official new terms in the age of social media: the story of hashtag on French Twitter

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 July 2022

Gyula Zsombok
Gyula Zsombok*
Affiliation:
Middlebury College
*
Email: gzsombok@middlebury.edu
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Abstract

As other chapters in this special issue demonstrate, social media proposes widely available data for sociolinguistic analysis. Twitter is an ideal resource to implement variationist approaches regarding regional differences, features specific to gender, and metrics of social media influence. At the same time, official intervention on language use, while somewhat studied in other corpora, is less explored on Twitter. French shows a long tradition of purist and prescriptive ideologies, embodied by the Académie française in France and the Office québécois de la langue française in Québec. The injection of recommended terminology aimed to eradicate foreign influence often has questionable success rate, especially in such an informal setting as Twitter. This article thus investigates lexical variation, in particular, the implantation of official new French translations mot-dièse and mot-clic between 2010 and 2016 that are meant to replace the English word hashtag. Results corroborate previous findings on the lacklustre implantation of the prescribed terms, while also revealing that users in Québec are more inclined to adapt them. Furthermore, diffusion online reflects face-to-face patterns that is cascading spread from large urban areas to smaller cities.

Type
Article
Information
Journal of French Language Studies , Volume 32 , Special Issue 2: Special Issue (French Variation in Digital Media) , July 2022 , pp. 145 - 164
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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