Un regard sur le français inclusif canadien dans une journée de Twitter

Abstract

This paper looks at the variation of typographical procedures and agreements related to inclusive French (FI) on the microblogging system Twitter in Canada. The corpus used includes 464 tweets geo-localized in Montreal, Ottawa and Quebec and published on May 12th, 2020. They were sorted into cases of simple inclusion (IS), uniform agreement (AU) and mixed agreement (AM). The results showed that IS (57%) is the most preferred approach. When the tweets presented more than one FI mark, the preferred structure was AM (27%). When compared to the 15% of AU cases, we might conclude that uniform agreement is not common in this corpus. The analysis of AM tokens showed a gradual decrease in agreement marks throughout a given tweet. The preferred FI typographical procedures in this corpus (complete doublets, abbreviated doublets with parentheses, and epicene forms) are consistent with the recommendations of the Office québécois de la langue française, despite the informal context. As my results show a set of alternative overlapping agreement systems, I propose that this heterogeneity is one of the characteristic features of inclusive French.