The COVID-19 Lingo: Societies’ Responses in form of Developing a Comprehensive Covidipedia of English vs. Persian Neologisms (Coroneologisms)

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

Department of English, Isfahan (Khorasgan) Branch, Islamic Azad University, Isfahan, Iran

Abstract

Languages as living and dynamic structured systems were influenced at the very first moments of the COVID-19 pandemic as they became medicalized by the use and practice of various jargons and technical terms. Meanwhile, homebound individuals around the world started to create a COVID-19 pandemic-related lexical-overload of neologisms (Coroneologisms or Corona coinages) in different languages which started to spread across the globe by mass media, and some of them even entered the official databases of the well-known dictionaries and Wikipedia corpora. This study was a scrutinized attempt to explore the English vs. Persian (Farsi) Coroneologisms across various Extensible Markup Language (XML) corpora and a huge body of E-resource discourses (websites, social media, and news channels and forums) based on embedded mixed-method design to provide a comprehensive insight into their types, structures, and meanings. To provide a better understanding of how and why particular Coroneologisms were created in terms of social, cultural, or political contributing factors, they were investigated based on the reflections of a series of sociolinguistic focus-group E-interviews with 184 volunteer English and Persian native speakers. This study might provide implications for sociolinguistics, corpus-based language studies, lexicographers, designers of corpora, etymologists, and discourse analysts in English and Persian.

Keywords

References

Akut, K. B. (2020). Morphological analysis of the neologisms during the COVID-19 pandemic. International Journal of English Language Studies, 2(3), 1-7.
Bohnemeyer, J. (2020). Linguistic relativity: From Whorf to now. The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Semantics, 4(6), 1-33. Doi:10.1002/9781118788516.sem013
Creswell, J. W., & Clark, V. L. P. (2017). Designing and conducting mixed methods research. California, US: Sage.
Ezzarrouki, I. (2020). Linguistic coinage during COVID-19 pandemic: Health care terminology. Journal of English Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics, 2(1), 54-64.
Gazsi, Dénes. (2020). Iranian languages. In C. Lucas & S. Manfredi (Eds), Arabic and contact-induced change (pp. 441–457). Berlin, Germany: Language Science Press. Doi:10.5281/zenodo.3744539
Haddad-Haddad, A., & Montero-Martínez, S. (2020). COVID-19: a metaphor-based neologism and its translation into Arabic. JCOM, 19(05). Doi:10.22323/2.19050201
Katermina, V., & Yachenko, E. (2020). Axiology of COVID-19 as a linguistic phenomenon in English mass media discourse. Advances in Journalism and Communication, 8(10), 59-67. Doi:10.4236/ajc.2020.82005
Khalfan, M., Batool, H., & Shehzad, W. (2020). COVID-19 neologisms and their social use: An analysis from the perspective of linguistic relativism. Linguistics and Literature Review, 6(2), 117-129.
Kortmann, B. (2020). English linguistics: essentials. Stuttgart, Germany: JB Hetzler'sche Verlags.
Levchenko, Y. (2010). Neologism in the lexical system of modern English. Munchen, Germany: GRIN Verlag.
Mallinson, C., Childs, B., & Van Herk, G. (2013). Data collection in sociolinguistics: Methods and applications. California, US: Routledge.
Mattiello, E. (2018). Analogy in Word-formation. Berlin, Germany: De Gruyter Mouton. Doi:10.1515/9783110551419
Piller, I., Zhang, J., & Li, J. (2020). Linguistic diversity in a time of crisis: Language challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, Multilingua, 39(5), 503-515. Doi:10.1515/multi-2020-0136
Plag, I. (2018). Word-formation in English. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Roig–Marin, A. (2020). English-based Coroneologisms: A short survey of our COVID-19-related vocabulary. English Today, 15(3), 1-3. Doi:10.1017/S0266078420000255
Journal of English Language Pedagogy and Practice
Volume 13, Issue 27
November 2020
Pages 26-52

Files

Share

How to cite

Statistics