Topic analysis of French–English tweets in France

Abstract

Abstract Twitter has become a popular means of communication used in a variety of fields. This widely used platform has an impact on the way people express themselves and is changing language usage worldwide at an unprecedented pace. This article investigates the reasons for the use of French–English language mixing among French users on Twitter using a topic analysis approach. This analysis draws on Gumperz’s theory of conversational switching. In order to collect tweets at a large scale, the data were collected in R using the rtweet package. A total of nine topic categories were identified and analyzed in this article: entertainment, internet/social media, events/community, politics/news, sports, sex/pornography, innovation/technology, fashion/makeup, and business. This study finds that entertainment is the most frequent topic discussed on Twitter. English words, such as trailer, spoil, and live are found in the data. This study enables a deeper understanding of users’ linguistic behavior online, and offers insights into future trends in intercultural and cross-language exchanges.