L’évidence des anglicismes dans les discours journalistiques français: Le cas du sport

Given their internationalization and their dependence on the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the Olympic Games provide good evidence of linguistic usages in the field of sport and constitute a preferred domain for the lexical study of anglicisms, since, although French is one of the official languages of the Olympic Games, the discourse of sport generally relies on English. Representative of this tendency, the work of journalists examined here displays a variety of lexical strategies. A linguistic analysis of two Olympic sports, athletics and swimming, seems to show that sport is inextricably linked to a particular structural discourse whose tenor is regularly conveyed by journalists. Beyond linguistic barriers, it seems that the perceived nature of sport leads to the privileging of anglicisms which command unquestioned acceptance much as the values of sport do — themselves generally taken for granted without discussion.