Applying a Gender Lens to Vocabularies of Identity in French- and English-Language Newspapers in New Brunswick and Acadie, 1880-1900

COMBINING QUANTITATIVE AND QUALITATIVE APPROACHES, Vocabularies of Identity / Vocabulaires identitaires1 is an interuniversity and multidisciplinary project that includes a database of articles compiled from New Brunswick and Acadie newspapers between 1880 and 1900. During this period, newspapers were important vehicles for communication and the construction of collective identities for both linguistic communities. “Collective identity” is defined in this project as a set of common values, a common sense of the past, and common goals for the future shared by a group of individuals. That identity is shaped and disseminated by using a specific lexicon, with the purpose of ensuring cohesion within the group and of reinforcing individual commitment to this collective identity. We know that today, more than ever, words are important; therefore, we will examine this lexicon closely to understand the associative and connotative meanings of the vocabulary used to define the identity of Acadians and the descendants of Loyalists. The advantage of using text analysis software such as the program Hyperbase2 for measuring word frequencies, co-occurrences, word associations, and semantic clusters is that it yields patterns of language that may not be readily visible to the reader when faced with large quantities of text, such as the content of this database. New Brunswick in particular provides a unique window on the coalescing of these identities, starting in the 1880s and continuing well into the 20th