Wednesday, April 27 2022
12 pm – 1:30 pm
Quebec French in the public space of the Facebook network (Fiona Patterson, doctoral student, Doctoral Program in Francophone Studies, York University)
Written digital communication, according to Michel Marcoccia (2016), is a use of language that demonstrates a conversationalization of writing, or even a hybridity of written and oral elements. Since these exchanges are often informal in nature, the virtual spaces of technology-mediated communications are fertile ground for studying language variation (Tremblay, 2020). Indeed, since the turn of the century, many researchers have addressed this question, studying the use of a variety of languages in SMS, chat, the Internet, and social networks, in private contexts as well as (among others, Tagliamonte and Denis, 2008; Cougnon, 2010; Androutsopoulos and Tereick, 2016; Biber, Egbert and Zhang, 2017). For Quebec French (FQ), only the sociolinguistic variation during SMS exchanges – conversations which are then private – has been studied (Blondeau et al., 2014, as well as Tremblay et al., 2020). The purpose of this presentation is to propose that this questioning on the variation of the FQ be broadened and transported to the terrain of the public space of the Facebook network. I will try to justify my choices, and explain my proposed methodology.