Naming displaced people: new patterns in media discourse? A discourse analysis of Le Monde and Le Figaro

The migrant crisis has received huge media coverage and has been the subject of many social controversies, among which the one sparked by Al Jazeera regarding the words migrant and refugee during the summer 2015. This study addresses the question of whether the lexical debate that followed had a permanent impact in journalistic writing patterns, by analysing media typifications of displaced people. Using a mixed methodology of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis, we analysed a corpus of 376,217 words from the two main French broadsheet newspapers, Le Monde and Le Figaro, in order to observe if the lexical debate influenced the choice of words of the journalists. The results of the study show that if some changes are visible after the debate (a higher frequency of refugee as well as an accurate usage of this legal term), the latter did not prevent journalists from using the word migrant (in spite of the negative connotations Al Jazeera decried). The study concludes with some hypotheses about the future of those terms, as they will continue expanding their meaning and their referent according to historical events.