Pandémie, polémique et variation: le ou la Covid?

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic has given rise to an explosion of neologisms to designate in the different languages the new realities that appear every day on a global scale. Between floating usage and normative positions, the grammatical gender of Covid-19 in French is at the heart of a controversy that is widely reported in the media. Based on a corpus of European and Canadian press articles, this contribution aims to identify the arguments put forward by the different parties and to show how linguistic, ideological and social variables are articulated in the press discourse. Our analysis shows the complexity of this debate in which many parameters intervene: the relationship of French speakers to borrowing in general and to anglicisms in particular, the tug-of-war between usage and norm, the legitimacy and the diffusion of reference discourses, the internal variation of French and the morphosyntactic preferences of both sides of the Atlantic.