Second-person pronoun use in French-language blogs

This study explores particular features of the discourse of French-language blogs, both to provide a general understanding of the discourse of these blogs and to provide a model for teachers wishing to perform similar analyses with their students. The chapter begins with an overview of the format of blogs and their development in the francophone world, with a particular focus on France and Canada. Next, using a corpus-driven approach, ten French-language blogs are analyzed in terms of their interactional structure and the use of the second-person address pronouns tu and vous. The data demonstrate that both interactional structure and second-person address pronoun use patterns are highly complex and not consistently predictable based on blog category or country of origin. The chapter concludes with specific suggestions for accessing and analyzing French-language blogs, both in terms of tu and vous use and other aspects of language variation.