Recent studies in psycholinguistics (Brauer and Landry, 2008; Gygax and al., 2021) show that masculine grammatical forms with generic value generate representations of male referents, thus invisibilising women and non-binary individuals. Numerous proposals have emerged in the French-speaking world to make women more visible or to neutralize gender identity in language: neologisms, such as feminized names of professions (autrice) and the gender-neutral pronoun iel, but also pairs (les étudiants et les étudiantes) and abbreviated pairs (étudiant·es, étudiant.es). Language authorities in France and Canada have not welcomed these forms in the same way: inclusive language has been promoted by the Office Québecois de la Langue Française since the late 1970s, whereas in France it remains controversial.
Even if inclusive French has been discussed extensively in the media, not much is known about its actual use. A few corpus studies have been carried out (Diaz and Heap, 2020; Vanhal, 2021). However, to our knowledge, no large-scale study of inclusive French has been conducted. This proposal addresses the research gap by examining inclusive linguistic strategies used online by women and men, in France and in Canada, on two platforms: Twitter and Reddit.
We hypothesize that 1. the types of inclusive strategies favored by internet users vary depending on their country; 2. women use inclusive language more frequently than men; and 3. both women and men use inclusive language more frequently on Twitter than on Reddit, since Reddit forums tend to be male-centric communities (Flesch, 2022).
We base our study on a 70-million word corpus of Reddit data, collected from the subreddits r/france and r/Quebec, and on a 50-million word corpus of tweets geolocalized in France and in Québec. Gender identity of internet users was obtained by searching for declarations such as Je suis une femme/un homme and for grammatical markers of gender. Several inclusive variables including neologisms, pairs and abbreviated pairs were taken into account.
Our research will help to understand which forms of inclusive French are the most frequently used and in what context, in order to help teachers of French as a foreign language to sort out the competing micro-norms: they will be better equipped to enable learners to communicate with French speakers, especially on social media. The collected data could also be used to provide materials for corpus-based learning.
References
Brauer, M., & Landry, M. 2008. Un ministre peut-il tomber enceinte ? L'impact du générique masculin sur les représentations mentales. L'Année psychologique, 108, 243–272.
Diaz, Y., & Heap, D. 2020. Variation dans les accords du français inclusif. Proceedings of the 2020 Annual Conference of the Canadian Linguistic Association.
Flesch, M. 2022. Pratiques langagières informelles des femmes et des hommes en ligne : étude quantitative d'un corpus de commentaires publiés sur le site internet Reddit. Proceedings of the 8ème Congrès Mondial de Linguistique Française.
Gygax, P., Sato, S., Öttl, A., & Gabriel, U. 2021. The masculine form in grammatically gendered languages and its multiple interpretations: a challenge for our cognitive system. Language Sciences, 83.
