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This article explores online language commentary in the French language on Twitter. The internet has provided a much wider opportunity for all French-speakers, from 'experts' to laypeople, to discuss and criticize the language use of others. Furthermore, whilst lay language commentary has presumably long taken place in spoken language, the internet gives us previously unprecedented access to the attitudes of a broader spectrum of society. This article analyses a corpus of French-language tweets which contain one of two non-standard conjugations: croivent (ils/elles croient) and voyent (ils/elles voient). The discussion focuses specifically on those tweets that comment on another person's use of non-standard language, examining the recurring tropes and imagery used. These demonstrate how online language commentary connects to a long tradition of printed language commentary in France, which dates back to, at least, the sixteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In February 2016 the French spelling reform of 1990, which introduced changes to approximately 2,000 words, became the object of discussion online, after it was announced that the new spellings would be included in textbooks from September. Analysing a corpus of tweets, containing key terms from the online discussion, JeSuisCirconflexe; ognon and réforme orthographe, this study gives an insight into the reactions to this governmental linguistic intervention, the recurring themes in their discourse and how this can be interpreted as prescriptive or purist behaviour. Although previous studies have extensively analysed reactions to the 1996 spelling reform in Germany, little research has considered online lay-reactions to the French reform. Given observations that online interactions differ in many ways to equivalent offline interactions, this study can form a point of contrast to previous studies conducted in offline contexts, thereby enriching the existing literature in this field. It is also often claimed that France is a country in which linguistic purism is deeply entrenched; this article will seek further evidence for these claims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]