Internet French

[Alexandre Enkerli]

At 12:08 PM -0500 11/26/1, Kerim Friedman wrote:
>I couldn't tell from the review if Crystal's book addresses non-english
>internet languages.
Me neither. Anyone knows if it does?

Personally, I'd be curious about similar work on French. As some of you may
know, French language ideology can be extremely strict and language snobs
abound. But French-speaking Net-dwellers tend to follow equivalent patterns
of language use as do English-speakers. AFAIK, French-speaking language
snobs complain more about the prominence of English expressions than about
discrepancies from standard French. It has lead to the Frenchification of a
lot of terms by language agencies such as Quebec's "Office national de la
langue française" which some people view as a Language Police. Both
standardized French forms ("internaute" for Net-dweller) and direct
borrowings ("email" instead of Frenchified "courriel") exist in Net-speak.
For some people, a major feature of Internet French is the common lack of
accented characters. Purists do complain about these and activists have
been trying to make accented characters available everywhere. No idea if
this will generalize to offline writing, though. Time (and school teachers)
will tell.

CUL8r! ("See you later") / ÀLP!  ("À la prochaine!")

Alex Enkerli
Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology
Indiana University