Past Event

The language politics of Twitter in Canada: English and French language ideologies, hashtags, and Canadian federal party leaders

Dr. Rachelle Vessey
(Newcastle University)

In 2011, the Canadian Standing Senate Committee on Official Languages concluded that the presence of French must be expanded in online spaces in order to respect language rights and address the imbalance towards English. However, the role of the nation-state in online language policing remains unclear. In Canada, where English and French are official languages, the online world is new territory for federal party leaders, who uphold pillars of Canadian nationalism, including official languages. However, social media provide contexts for discussions about language in which traditional offline categories such as “nation state” have questionable relevance. In such spaces, it is unclear whether and how beliefs about language are manifested, the role they play in communication, and their implications for language policies. This paper accounts for some the ways in which language ideologies feature in social media and their implications for the offline world of nation states. More specifically, this paper analyses representations of and assumptions about languages in the Twitter accounts of Canadian federal party leaders.

Data consist of publically-available Tweets from the leaders of Canada’s main political parties: 1028 Tweets (20,518 words) in English and 1073 Tweets (21,676 words) in French from Prime Minister of Canada Stephen Harper’s English and French Twitter accounts; 1798 Tweets (36,440 words) from Official Opposition Leader Thomas Mulcair; and 3426 Tweets (65,264 words) from Liberal Party Leader Justin Trudeau. These datasets are compared against corpora of tweets focusing on Canadian politics using English (#CDNPOLI) and French (#POLCAN) hashtags that were collected over a seven week period in 2014. Data are analysed using corpus-assisted discourse studies, an approach that combines corpus linguistics and discourse analysis in order to uncover patterns in the language being used (see e.g. Baker, 2006; Stubbs, 1996). Findings show that although languages tend not to be an explicit topic of discussion, the French language, culture and speakers are more topical than the English language, culture and speakers. Also, assumptions about languages become embedded in the federal party leaders’ Tweets through the use of bilingual vs. monolingual Twitter accounts, the extent of code-switching and code-mixing, and the use of English and French hashtags. These findings indicate not only a shift in language ideologies from those found in Canadian news media (Vessey, 2013) to new and social media; they also suggest the new and evolving arenas in which language politics must be played out.

• Baker, P. (2006). Using corpora in discourse analysis. London & New York: Continuum.
• Senate Committee on Official Languages. (2012). Internet, new media, and social media: Respect for language rights!
• Stubbs, M. (1996). Text and corpus analysis: Computer-assisted studies of language and culture. Oxford, UK and Cambridge, USA: Blackwell Publishers.
• Vessey, R. (2013). Language ideologies and discourses of national identity in Canadian newspapers: A cross-linguistic corpus-assisted discourse study. Unpublished PhD Thesis. Queen Mary, University of London.

About the Presenter

Dr. Rachelle Vessey is Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Applied Linguistics at Newcastle University (UK). She uses corpus linguistics and discourse analysis to analyse news and social media in order to demonstrate how “common sense” beliefs about language are related to broader social issues and hierarchies within minority groups, national groups, and a globalised world. In particular, she focuses on the role of former colonial languages (English and French) and their role in countries such as Canada. She earned her MA from Carleton University and her PhD from the University of London. She has published articles related to these areas in the journals Language & Intercultural Communication, Discourse & Society, Corpora and Multilingua and her monograph Language ideologies and Canadian media is forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan.