Images of English in the French Press

Marc Deneire (1)

1 Didactique des langues et sociolinguistique (Crapel)

This paper attempts to question the image of a one-sided monolithic French resistance to the spread of English. For this purpose, a corpus of over one thousand articles from newspapers and magazines traditionally associated with different political views such as Le Monde and Liberation for the left and Le Figaro for the right, as well as newsletters and other materials published by the corporate world and trade-unions is analysed using Hyperbase for a principal component analysis and Alceste for a descending hierarchical classification that breaks the corpus down in different classes.. The purpose of the paper is to establish relations between various social strata, institutional environments, ideological positions, and economic interests on the one hand, and the different attitudes towards English, ranging from enthusiastic adoption by the business world to fierce ideological opposition based on centuries-old forms of anti-Americanism and linguistic protectionism. The results show that traditional cultural resistance to English is limited to a small set of national newspapers, regardless of ideological orientation. At the opposite end, business-oriented newspapers and magazines tend to encourage the use of English. Finally, the issue is almost completely absent from the widely-read regional press, which suggests that it is of minor importance for most of the French in their daily lives. Through this study, I hope to give a more nuanced and diverse picture of French attitudes towards English than that which is usually presented in the English-speaking press and in academia.

Domaines: Linguistique

Marc Deneire. Images of English in the French Press. Andrew Linn, Neil Bermel, Gibson Ferguson. Attitudes towards English in Europe, De Gruyter, pp.XX, 2014. ⟨hal-00944974⟩