Googling Toubon: Testing the effects of institutional French language purism

This study investigates the impact of French corpus planning efforts in two semantic domains, telecommunication and sport. Lists of Anglicisms and their French counterparts pertaining to these two domains are used in a corpus study using the Google Books corpus. A method to explore this corpus diachronically is proposed, and analyses assessing the odds of encountering the ‘official’ French terms over English loanwords are carried out. Despite a certain success of the French competitors in some specific cases, the overall analyses, modelling the odds ratios using mixed effect models, show no sustainable effect of the efforts to impose French alternatives to English neologisms. The results and possible explanations for the statistical patterns are discussed in the light of previous research on Anglicisms and language planning