ABSTRACT
In February 2013, inspectors from the Office québécois de la langue française (OQLF) sent a warning letter to the owner of the Buonanotte restaurant in Montreal for its use of Italian words such as ‘pasta’ and ‘bottiglia’ on its menus. When the owner tweeted a photo of the letter to his followers, it was picked up by local journalists and activist groups, which shared links to the story over social media several thousand times within the first day of the story breaking. The story was picked up by international news media and reported in as many as 14 countries and in a variety of different languages (Wyatt 2013). The negativity of international news and social media has been argued to have contributed to the resignation of the OQLF head Louise Marchand, the revision of OQLF complaint procedures and the abandonment of Bill 14, which proposed changes to Quebec’s Charter of the French Language. With relation to this context, the following research questions are addressed:
. How are languages represented in news articles, news commentary and retweets of the news stories focusing on ‘Pastagate’?
