La dénomination des nouvelles maladies infectieuses sous l’angle de la dimension sociale de la communication. Le cas de la terminologie française des pandémies grippales des XXe et XXIe siècles

The aim of this article is to examine the French terminology of influenza pandemics in the 20th and 21st centuries, considering the social dimension of communication. In particular, the names of influenza pandemics and viruses are analysed in order to account for the terminological variation in this field and to describe the word formation processes. The terms are extracted from a corpus of press articles, published in the newspapers Le Petit Parisien and Le Matin (for the Spanish flu of 1918–1919) and Le Monde (for the Asian flu of 1957–1958, the Hong Kong flu of 1968–1969 and the H1N1 flu of 2009–2010). In the conclusion, the main features of influenza pandemics terminology in French are assessed and summarised.