Since 1999, The Frye literary Festival is a bilingual celebration of the literary landscape with writers from all over Canada and beyond participating in literary events in Moncton, New Brunswick. The festival is named in honour of famous Canadian writer Northrop Frye who in his book The Educated Imagination (1966) writes "The fundamental job of the imagination in ordinary life, then, is to produce, out of the society we have to live in, a vision of the society we want to live in". This quote inspires language imagination within the Festival in bringing together two officially recognized linguistic communities in Canada, the francophone minority and the anglophone majority with events in either official language or with bilingual interpretation. Since 2015, the hiring of queer employees has coincided with the shifting of the Festival's public communication strategy from bilingualism to queer practices of bilingualism. In other words, queer agency has contributed to produce queer linguistic practices in both official language, including the minority language, French, in ways that create queer language accessibility for those who do not recognize themselves in standardized binary forms. The written word produced by the festival has become a testimony to queer existence and is an excellent example of how language without linguists (advocating for linguistic change from an expert perspective) is shaped by everyday practices. In this presentation, I will present a digital data corpus that focuses on the queer language practices observed on the literary festival's website and social media between May 2021 to May 2022. This corpus will allow me to compare bilingual practices of queerness with a greater focus on French language practices. In adopting an applied sociolinguistics pathway to queer language practices, I will also analyze the queerification of the festival's language through the notion of sociolinguistic citizenship inspired by Betsy Rymes (2020) which goes beyond the idea of examining what non-linguists think of language practices to interpret specific forms of storytelling in public spaces through language choices. How can we imagine queer futures without queer language ? In other words, queer agency contributes to queer sociolinguistic citizenship within the literary festival language landscape and allows us to understand how social change also stems from action to broaden collective consciousness of queer existence within linguistic communities.
