NAMING DISPLACED PEOPLE:

Abstract

!e migrant crisis has received huge media coverage and has been the subject ofmany social controversies, among which the one sparked by Al Jazeera regardingthe words migrant and refugee during the summer 2015. !is study addresses thequestion of whether the lexical debate that followed had a permanent impact injournalistic writing patterns, by analysing media typifications of displaced people.Using a mixed methodology of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis, we analyseda corpus of 376,217 words from the two main French broadsheet newspapers,Le Monde and Le Figaro, in order to observe if the lexical debate influenced thechoice of words of the journalists. !e results of the study show that if some changesare visible a$er the debate (a higher frequency of refugee as well as an accurateusage of this legal term), the latter did not prevent journalists from using the wordmigrant (in spite of the negative connotations Al Jazeera decried). !e study concludeswith some hypotheses about the future of those terms, as they will continueexpanding their meaning and their referent according to historical events.