La « langue française » dans la presse francophone: idéologies, représentations et enjeux discursifs

Social and cultural changes, as well as technological innovations, induce a deep reflection about changes undergone by linguistic ideologies at the present time. One might wonder whether the belief that French is a national and prestige language, a language of “good usage”, is still widespread. The analysis of a corpus of French, Quebec and African press, mainly studied on a linguistic and discursive level, allows to reflect on the diverse representations of French in plurilinguistic contexts and to understand the progress of the ideologies concerning the French language. From a methodological point of view, this paper wishes to study the discursive dimension to point out the strategies at work on the elaboration of linguistic ideologies: enunciative positions, positive or negative values attributed to French in a more or less explicit way and pre-speeches are only some of the parameters that will enable us to describe the outlines of the linguistic ideologies involved.