Covid-19 et communication de crise. Focus linguistique sur les tweets francophones de Belgique

Abstract

The Covid-19 health crisis of 2020 strongly affected the international community. Especially during the lockdown period, social media were widely used for information and emotion sharing. This article aims to keep a material trace of these crisis communication trends. To reach this aim, we applied quantitative and qualitative methods on a corpus of 100,000 tweets we collected in the French-speaking part of Belgium. The corpus is divided into three sub-groups: citizens, politicians and the media. We first present the corpus collection and the methodology we followed. We also look at the lexical creativity that resulted from the crisis and the lockdown situation. We then propose a semantic approach of the themes that emerged from the crisis tweets and which highlight citizens’ concerns. Finally, we depict the personalities related to the crisis, by focusing on their communication and on the image they portray to the public.