French election: the lexical world of the candidates

April 20, 2007

On Sunday, I’ll be going to London to cast my vote in the first round of the French presidential elections, along with some of the other 100,000 French expats who live in the area. This being a language blog, I thought it’d be interesting to use Jean Véronis’ Nébuloscope, a nifty tool which gives the "lexical world" of a particular word on the French-speaking Web. I’ve done a search on each of the main candidates' names, and the boxes below show the words that have been most often associated with them in the past 3 months; the bigger the word, the more often it was found:

François Bayrou (centre right)

Jean-Marie Le Pen (far-right)

Nicolas Sarkozy (right)

Ségolène Royal (left)

Apart from looking really striking, a few things caught my eye. First, Ségolène Royal, the Socialist candidate, doesn’t appear in any of the lexical worlds of her opponents, while other members of the Socialist Party, such as Jospin and Hollande, do. Strange...

Looking at the themes that emerge, Royal is linked to the future of the country through her concern for younger generations (avenir, famille, éducation, enfance, enseignement, scolaire - future, family, education, childhood, teaching, school), while Sarkozy’s word cloud is all about the workings of the State (dossiers, économie, État, finances, gouvernement, immigration, intérieur, loi, République - files, economy, State, finances, government, immigration, home office, law, Republic). Bayrou’s lexical world is very scattered, which may or may not fit in with the general view in the papers that his programme is slightly vague. I was extremely surprised to see no words related to immigration in Le Pen’s cloud, but then again he has toned down his language in the last few months in a bid to attract new voters.

The Nébuloscope can be used for any word at all; be careful, however: it is highly addictive!