Croient or Croivent: French Language Commentary on Twitter

Abstract

This article explores online language commentary in the French language on Twitter. The internet has provided a much wider opportunity for all French-speakers, from ‘experts’ to laypeople, to discuss and criticize the language use of others. Furthermore, whilst lay language commentary has presumably long taken place in spoken language, the internet gives us previously unprecedented access to the attitudes of a broader spectrum of society. This article analyses a corpus of French-language tweets which contain one of two non-standard conjugations: croivent ( ils/elles croient) and voyent ( ils/elles voient). The discussion focuses specifically on those tweets that comment on another person's use of non-standard language, examining the recurring tropes and imagery used. These demonstrate how online language commentary connects to a long tradition of printed language commentary in France, which dates back to, at least, the sixteenth century.