ABSTRACT
In a recent report, the Canadian Standing Senate Committee on Official Languages acknowledged that social media pose new challenges for language rights. While the Committee’s (2012) report observed the need for greater presence of French online, arguably of equal importance are the representations of languages online. Language representations can be used as a barometer, indicating the evolving ideological and discursive ecologies in which policies exist and to which they must adjust. Furthermore, although social media provide new opportunities for language use and for communication more generally, it is unclear the extent to which they differ from more traditional news media. Canadian news media have traditionally existed along parallel lines in English and French and these divisions could indeed be reproduced in Canadian social media, with concomitant divisions in terms of the language ideologies embedded in these media. Furthermore, as English continues to be the international language of communication, interactions between international English language media and Canadian national Englishlanguage media should not be underestimated. Thus, the aim of this paper is to compare trends in news and social media representations, English-medium and French-medium representations and national and international language ideologies. With this basis, the aim is also to gauge the ‘barometer’ capacity of social media, i.e. their status as indicators of new and evolving language policy contexts. To examine these issues, data are examined
