Old and New in Language Variation in French Digital Media: A Commentary

Abstract/Excerpt Papers in this Special Issue fill a gap in French sociolinguistics by providing a coherent and yet diverse sample of empirical studies on a variety of structural aspects of French digital media. Collectively, their thematic focus reflects a traditional framing of language variation, well known from variationist sociolinguistics, correlating empirically observed phonological, morphological, and lexical patterns with social and linguistic variables, among them age, gender, and genre. In this commentary, I reflect on each paper’s unique contribution to recent sociolinguistic research on digital media, and the volume’s goal to examine socially conditioned variation in selected contexts of twenty-first-century digital writing in French.