“…This article proposes to measure the efficacy of top-down intervention on the lexicon from a single source: the publications of the Commission d'enrichissement de la langue française (CELF, 'Commission for the Enrichment of the French Language') in Journal officiel. Previous studies investigated terminology implantation drawing on manuals by multinational IT companies (Saint, 2015), specialized communications in the domain of nanotechnology (Quirion, 2011), or newspaper articles from French-speaking territories (Kim, 2015(Kim, , 2018 and they confirmed striking variation pertaining to the relative frequency of official recommendations: publications in Québec are more likely to reject Anglicisms when French terms are at their disposal. Rather than following previous studies that focused on a variety of prescriptive inputs during a given time period, this study applies precise data-analytical methods to a single, large and publicly available newspaper corpus to examine the variable use of English lexical borrowings and their prescribed French equivalents before and after the official date of publication of the new French term in Journal officiel, the legal source of laws, decrees and other official information published by the French Parliament and the national government.…”