Negotiation of lexis on French Wikipedia




Merryn Davies-Deacon · Queen’s University Belfast



m.davies-deacon@qub.ac.uk · merryndd.net

Lexis

  • Subject to explicit control
  • Topics of interest:
    • Creation and success of official coinages (courriel)
    • Morphological integration of new lexis (le/la Covid)
    • Social justice (iel)
  • Different authorities (mot-dièse, mot-clic; Zsombok 2022)
  • Purism (Walsh 2014)

Wikipedia

  • French Wikipedia since 2001, over 2.5 million articles
  • Collaborative/heteroglossic authorship
  • Online context
    • English-dominant
    • Awareness of global issues
    • Proximity of geographically disparate speakers
  • Common infrastructure (see Enyedy and Tkacz 2011), but divergent administration practices
  • Some room for linguistic variation? (see Baxter 2009 on Breton)

Lexis on Wikipedia

  • Gdańsk debate (Jemielniak 2014)
  • WP:NPOV (criticised by Lovink and Tkacz 2011)
  • Conflict resolution
    • Talk pages
    • Voting (seen as a last resort; Jemielniak 2014:63)

Ideas and research questions

  • Do articles use officially prescribed terminology?
  • Is the use of terminology openly debated? What structures enable this?
  • How can we characterise the language policy of Wikipedia?
    • “the people who show up make the rules” (Ayers 2020:91)
  • Are all contributions valued equally?
    • “authorship tends to be far less dispersed than might be assumed” (Arendt and Reershemius 2024:4)
  • How does Wikipedia compare with the media in regard to the use of terminology and associated discourse?
  • Does what is on Wikipedia represent reality?

Data and methodology

  • FranceTerme: available in XML format
  • c. 11000 terms, 10000 foreign equivalents
  • The process:
    • Select a sample from the FranceTerme corpus
    • Query Wikipedia API to discover whether articles exist
    • Check whether articles redirect
    • Indicate whether there may be discussion of terminology on talk pages

Checking 1 of 50: conservatif
Checking 2 of 50: mutation ponctuelle
Checking 3 of 50: rampe
Checking 4 of 50: espace extra-atmosphérique
Checking 5 of 50: jeu rétro

29 terms were found: mutation ponctuelle, rampe, espace extra-atmosphérique, notoriété, complexe, ludification, Casablanca, DCC, guerre dissymétrique, disquette, Portugaise, pouvoir d'achat, enjambement, silhouette, Guinéen, Naypyidaw, sourdine, bombe […]
21 terms were not found: conservatif, jeu rétro, la République du Zimbabwé, trichite, commission de direction, refroidissement naturel, baril livré, franco le long du navire […]

Foreign equivalent terms

  • Cases with a page for the foreign term, but not for the recommended French term: ambush marketing (communication optimiste)
  • Cases where the foreign term redirects to the recommended term (datamining → exploration des données)
  • A sample of 50:

12 terms were found: proteasome, cypher, SSO, infobox, base jumping, shunt, chromophore, tender, overclock, NFB, worm, camper.
38 terms were not found: aquaporin, megacell, injection blow moulding, self-controlled case series study, die bonding, vernier motor, V2N communication, topping-up, launch site, front-end engineering design, cohesive ends, chiroptic, selfish DNA, soft tourism, electromagnetic wave heating, flex office, military deception, dynamic cutting, virtopsy, disposal orbit, oncoprotein, confinement barrier, alternate multilayer, exogeology, pop-up retail, air sparging, rigid-framed bridge, agronomic biofortification, return on investment, modeler, dual view display, third place, back-end of the fuel cycle, de-hazing, readthrough translation, trend setter, grain boundary, transient expression.

Discourse

  • Timor oriental
  • Discussed on talk page:
    • Gender of the toponym
    • Capitalisation of république
  • Lack of responses, but an attempt to start dialogue?
  • Redirect from Timor-Oriental to Timor oriental; explicit reference to FranceTerme in the article

Another example: astronaute

  • Various terms depending on nationality
  • Neutral term voyageur spatial proposed but unattested
  • Authorities invoked: Wiktionary (for consistency?), OQLF, DGLFLF/FranceTerme, CNES, literature (anecdotally), school textbooks
  • “termes inventés par de (mauvais) journalistes”
  • Terms discussed in the article itself; astronaute is of longest standing

Emerging themes

  • Use of talk pages to attempt to find consensus
  • Appeal to external authorities
    • References to Académie française – despite general irrelevance to French speakers (Estival and Pennycook 2011)
    • European French as default?
  • Attention to detail and concerns around consistency – hard to achieve
  • Role of redirect pages

References

  • Arendt, B. and Reershemius, G. (2024). Digital writing in Low German: Between elite and grassroot literacies. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, DOI: 10.1080/01434632.2024.2354351.
  • Ayers, P. (2020). Wikipedia and libraries. In J. Reagle and J. Koerner, eds. Wikipedia @ 20: Stories of an incomplete revolution, pp. 89–106. MIT Press.
  • Baxter, R. N. (2009). New technologies and terminological pressure in lesser-used languages: The Breton Wikipedia, from terminology consumer to potential terminology provider. Language Problems and Language Planning 33(1), 60–80.
  • Enyedy, E. and Tkacz, N. (2011). “Good luck with your wikiPAIDia”: Reflections on the 2002 fork of the Spanish Wikipedia. In G. Lovink and N. Tkacz, eds. Critical point of view: A Wikipedia reader, pp. 110–118. Institute of Network Cultures.
  • Estival, D. and Pennycook, A. (2011). L’Académie française and Anglophone language ideologies. Language Policy 10, 325–341.
  • Jemielniak, D. (2014). Common knowledge? An ethnography of Wikipedia. Stanford University Press.
  • Lovink, G. and Tkacz, N. (2011). The “C” in CPOV: Introduction to the CPOV reader. In G. Lovink and N. Tkacz, eds. Critical point of view: A Wikipedia reader, pp. 9–13. Institute of Network Cultures.
  • Walsh, O. (2014). “Les anglicismes polluent la langue française”: Purist attitudes in France and Quebec. Journal of French Language Studies 24, 423–449.
  • Zsombok, G. (2022). Official new terms in the age of social media: The story of hashtag on French Twitter. Journal of French Language Studies 32, 145–164.