La variation géographique et sociale dans le français d'internet: émojis et émoticônes en France et au Québec

Abstract

This article explores geographical and gender variation in the use of emoticons et emojis in French, in two sets of corpora: two corpora of tweets geolocalized in France and in Québec, and two corpora of comments posted on a French and a Québec Reddit forum. Results show that on Reddit, emojis are more frequent in the Quebec corpus than in the France corpus, and that emoticons are more frequent in the French corpora. They also show that emojis are more frequent than emoticons on Twitter, but not on Reddit. The effect of gender is significant in all corpora, with women using more emoticons and emojis than men. Finally, an analysis of the French Twitter corpus, which is annotated with age, reveals no effect of age on the frequency of emojis.