TECHNOLINGUALISM AND MULTILINGUALISM ON THE WEB 3.0: UBEK ET RICA BLOG

The democratisation of the Internet has given rise to a digital society, the most influential, smart, and cumbersome in the history of humanity. English, the most used language on the Internet, accounts for 49.7% of the linguistic content across all digital platforms. The dominance of English has posed a linguistic challenge to Francophone, Hispanophone, Russophone, Lusophone, Sinophone, Arabophone, and many other linguistic communities for several decades. English continuously enriches itself with emerging technological buzzwords thanks to linguistic content disseminated on websites and digital social network applications such as ChatGPT, Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, etc. This research focuses on the sociolinguistic competition between English and French in the virtual world, analysing code-switching (English and French) on the French weblog Usbek et Rica, which adopts this style to convey information to its Francophone audience. Can it be said that this illustrates the linguistic homogenisation of English as the language of the Internet to the detriment of other languages, such as French? This article aims to answer this question by examining articles published on usbeketrica.com from 2016 to 2020, using these publications as a data corpus. It also critiques the programming languages of the blog in comparison with natural languages in society, applying the Marie-Anne Paveau’s ecological linguistic approach, which stipulates that all linguistic and extra-linguistic signs produce symmetrical meanings in the digital ecosystem. The findings show that the impact of English on French, in terms of technological language, is increasingly evident on the blog.