Abstract
This chapter focuses on another “language ideological debate” in Canada known as “Pastagate”. When inspectors from the Office québécois de la langue française (OQLF) objected to the use of the word “pasta” in a Montreal restaurant in February 2013, a backlash in news and social media erupted internationally and resulted in a number of changes affecting Quebec’s language policy context. A comparison of English and French online news articles, online commentary, and retweets of the stories from Canada, USA, UK, and France shows similarities across English-medium representations in news and social media. These findings suggest the extent to which dominant, transnational language ideologies in online forums can have direct implications for linguistic minorities in the offline world of nation-states.
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Vessey, R. (2016). Language Ideologies in Online News, Commentary, and Twitter: The Case of “Pastagate”. In: Language and Canadian Media. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53001-1_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53001-1_7
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