The life of a loanword: A case study of le coming out in the French magazine Têtu (1995–2015)

Abstract

In this paper we investigate the sociocultural dimensions of lexical borrowing by focusing on the diachronic use of a socially charged English loanword—le coming out—in Têtu, a popular gay lifestyle magazine that was published in French from 1995 to 2015. We created a comprehensive corpus of tokens of the borrowing from twenty-one issues (one per year) of the magazine. Our discourse analysis of these tokens shows not only a change in the loanword's form (le come-out eventually transforms into le coming out); it also illustrates a striking change in the contexts of its use. Whereas the term initially references the coming out of notable Anglo-American public figures, over time it is used increasingly to refer to French public figures and then to “ordinary” French people meant to reflect the magazine's readers. We argue that the magazine does not just feature this (and other) anglicisms in editorial content, but that it also models how such terms should be used by the community of readers that it addresses. Ultimately, our study reveals how a mass-mediated artifact such as Têtu works to establish and solidify the link between semiotic forms such as lexical borrowings and the social types of which (imagined) communities are comprised.