Voulez-vous un grilled-cheese ? An analysis of newly accepted English words in France and in Quebec
Date
2018-03-30
Authors
Corwin, Rachel
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Abstract
On September 18th, 2017, The Globe and Mail published an article reacting to English words being recently considered acceptable by the Office québécois de la langue française (OQLF), claiming, “it's no small matter that the watchdogs have given their blessing to the humble grilled-cheese sandwich”. This same year, Le Grand Robert published its annual list of newly accepted words, some of them being of English origin. How are these words being used in everyday French? To attempt to answer our question, our research explores the integration of six of these newly accepted words in French and in French-Canadian press articles. We chose two words relating to food (cocktail and grilled-cheese) and four words relating to technology (spoiler, youtubeur/euse, geek and troller). We performed a comparative analysis of the occurrences of these words to see their syntactical and lexical integrations in French discourse. Our hypotheses were that there would be variations in the spelling of the words as well as in the usage of the words in context. Our analysis did show some variations in the way the words were used, as well as spelling variations and diacritic markers indicating a certain level of fluidity in the words’ usages.
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French, Linguistics, Anglicism