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Articles

Vol. 11 (2019)

Representations of New Brunswick's Institutional Bilingualism in an Online Petition: A Logometric Discourse Analysis

Submitted
November 1, 2019
Published
2019-11-01

Abstract

Using the methodological framework developed by the French school of textual data analysis, this article examines the social representations of institutional bilingualism in New Brunswick as expressed in an online petition launched in 2013, “Stop the hiring discrimination against citizens who speak only English.” To that end, we conduct an analysis of the “lexical worlds” of a corpus constituted of 2,372 individual comments made in English. Through the analysis, we show that the “lexical worlds” in the petition reveal indicators of social representations concerning, among other things, the majority/minority power relations between social groups and the notion of qualification in the context of work, as well as out-migration of New Brunswickers.