Abstract: The speed at which technological innovation takes place, particularly in information technology, is a vexed question for language planning bodies which are overwhelmed by the task of creating and disseminating french terminology adapted to users’ actual life and needs. there are unfortunately very few means by which the acceptance rate of these french terms can be measured. this study, which is part of a larger research project, entitled Adapting French iT terminology in Canada (L’aménagement de la terminologie française de l’informatique au Canada (crshc–2004-200 ), examines how a sample of these day-to-day terminologies is adopted and actually used in oral exchanges through analysing the epiterminological discourse of the subjects studied. epiterminological discourse is inspired by the concept of epilinguistics, i.e. the way ordinary speakers talk about language, languages, verbal behaviour, style and sociolinguistic registers (laurendeau 2004). it is applied here to language for special purposes and seems to offer significant insight into the attitude that speakers have to the terms they use and consequently their acceptance rate. for example, does the way a speaker rate a term indicate whether it is liable to be more generally accepted, and if so to what extent? Our findings are drawn from the corpus mentioned above.
