Abstract
After the 2016 spelling reforms deleted the accent circumflex from some French vowels, on right-wing French Twitter, the circonflexe reappeared in the center of the French flag – echoing the flag of Vichy France. Tweets with the hashtag #JeSuisCirconflexe resemiotized the accent circumflex as icon of a lost Frenchness, or voiced the racial other in a colonial faux pidgin to frame them as illiterate and brutish. Drawing on research on resemiotization (Leppänen, Sirpa, Samu Kytölä, Henna Jousmäki, Saija Peuronen & Elina Westinen. 2014. Entextualization and resemiotization as resources for identification in social media. In The language of social media, 112–136. London: Palgrave Macmillan) and raciolinguistics (Flores, Nelson & Jonathan Rosa. 2015. Undoing appropriateness: Raciolinguistic ideologies and language diversity in education. Harvard Educational Review, 85(2). 149–171), this article explores how constructions of mock youth French use raciolinguistic tropes to imagine a language of social decline, connecting linguistic purism to racist myths of white genocide and the great replacement. Despite this, youth invert the imagination of their illiteracy, using playful language and satirizing white speech (Rosa, Jonathan. 2016b. Standardization, racialization, languagelessness: Raciolinguistic ideologies across communicative contexts. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 26(2). 162–183) to contest French nationalism – reframing #JeSuisCirconflexe as #JeSuisSirCornflakes.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Racialization and the national body: (Re)defining selves and others in changing contexts of liberal democratic governance
- “#JeSuisSirCornflakes”: Racialization and resemiotization in French nationalist Twitter
- “They are just a danger”: Racialized ideologies in Northern Italy and the Philippines
- Talking “like a race”: Gender, authority, and articulate speech in African American students’ marking speech acts
- Racialization and gender in Tumblr: Beyoncé as a raciolinguistic semiotic resource
- Producing white comfort through “corporate cool”: Linguistic appropriation, social media, and @BrandsSayingBae
- Commentary
- Commentary: On affect and race under capitalism
- Book Review
- Looking like a language, sounding like a race: Raciolinguistic ideologies and the learning of latinidad
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Racialization and the national body: (Re)defining selves and others in changing contexts of liberal democratic governance
- “#JeSuisSirCornflakes”: Racialization and resemiotization in French nationalist Twitter
- “They are just a danger”: Racialized ideologies in Northern Italy and the Philippines
- Talking “like a race”: Gender, authority, and articulate speech in African American students’ marking speech acts
- Racialization and gender in Tumblr: Beyoncé as a raciolinguistic semiotic resource
- Producing white comfort through “corporate cool”: Linguistic appropriation, social media, and @BrandsSayingBae
- Commentary
- Commentary: On affect and race under capitalism
- Book Review
- Looking like a language, sounding like a race: Raciolinguistic ideologies and the learning of latinidad