Evolution of the gender of "COVID-19" in traditional and social media in the French of three continents
Michael Dow, Patrick Drouin
January 2021 

In this paper, we trace the evolution from February to June 2020 of the gender of the noun "COVID-19" in French with respect to two databases: first, a Twitter database of nearly 78,000 tweets and second, a database of traditional media of approximately 500,000 articles. Each database considers only gender-marked instances of the term "COVID-19," and our corpora are tagged for geographical origin in order to compare and contrast varieties of French as spoken in three continents, namely Africa, (North) America and Europe. We find that American media comply categorically and immediately with the recommendations of the feminine by the World Health Organization and various local (Canadian) linguistic authorities in early March 2020. More than 50% of tweets in the American data follow suit soon after. African media is similar in that a large number of articles and tweets adopt the feminine, but only coinciding with the recommendation of the feminine by the Académie Française in early May 2020. Finally, we find negligible use of the feminine in the European data. We argue that several factors are likely at play in these results, namely, dialect-specific tendencies in loanword adaptation and the French gender system, the relationship between linguistic authorities and local media, public attitudes towards linguistic authority and the relative time of the recommendations made by these linguistic authorities.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/005711 (please use that when you cite this article)
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keywords:	french, covid-19, gender, corpus, morphology, phonology
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