Attitudes on Twitter towards French inclusive writing

Abstract

Abstract This chapter reports on a study which combines techniques from corpus linguistics and discourse analysis to explore attitudes to French inclusive writing (écriture inclusive) on the social media microblogging site, Twitter. The study takes a dual approach to exploring the expression of attitudes in the corpus, by investigating both the lexico-semantics of tweets and domain-specific expressive features such as retweets and favourites. The study adds to the growing body of research into attitudes towards specific language features (rather than varieties/dialects) and places this debate within the larger context of the feminization of the French language. The results reveal a large degree of overlap between attitudes towards inclusive writing at the official and individual levels, which is argued to be related to the underlying ideology of the standard which obtains in France.