Terms and Digital Discourse: Lost in a Maze of Administration. A Case Study of the Concept of Unemployment Benefits

Over the past two decades, administrative services have increasingly shifted online, fundamentally changing how service providers communicate with users, and how citizens engage with public services. Today, essential administrative information is published on websites, which became the main channel of communication for informing citizens about their rights and procedures. This is particularly true for welfare-related communication, where citizens must be well informed to access their entitlements. One of the consequences of this shift is that written administrative discourse has become natively digital. In this paper, we conduct a case study of the concept of “unemployment benefits” in order to uncover trends in terminology in native digital discourse. After collecting a corpus of texts from official administra- tive websites in France and the United Kingdom, we use corpus linguistics tools to analyse terminology. We show how diachronic variation in naming key benefit schemes, such as “unemployment benefits”, results in terminology instability, as multiple denominations coexist on the websites. Moreover, this study reveals that websites build a fragmented thread of discourse in which term variation strongly diminishes the cohesive role of terminology. Ultimately, by conducting a comparative analysis of terminology in the UK and France, we identify emerging trends in digital administrative terminology.