LANGUAGE CHANGES, LESSONS OF COVID-19 AND CORONEOLOGISMS

Abstract

Worldwide, the changes are either viewed positively as those updating languages or negatively as those deteriorating them. With English widely recognized as an international language, a lingua franca, numerous governmental and non-governmental organizations make it their business to keep the language understandable, at the same time preserving and introducing a variety of meanings and words when dealing with lexis. Changes in grammar (preference for gerunds instead of infinitives, for example) and pronunciation can take longer to be noticed as they happen over a longer period of time (the Great Vowel Shift). Currently, lexical changes get covered in dictionaries with little delay and are easy to track in online versions. Annually, 800-1,000 newly coined words or added meanings push way into English dictionaries. Approximately five times more are coined each year but fail to get in wide use and meet the acceptance criteria of lexicographers. Up to 2019, most lexical innovations were focused on technological breakthroughs. However, in 2020 medicine gained unprecedented attention due to the pandemic, initially pinpointed in Wuhan, China, and later spread all over the world � all the continents are currently exposed to COVID-19. Therefore, it has been of little surprise when in the end of 2020 most of the year words by English dictionaries were about COVID-19, which has irrevocably changed lifestyles and reality. The purpose of the article is to trace lexical changes caused by the coronavirus outbreak and analyse newly-coined lexemes. The following methods were used: linguistic analysis, observation, mathematical calculations. Thus, the purpose of our article is to trace lexical changes caused by the coronavirus outbreak and analyse newlycoined lexemes. Due to the Internet and a significant influence of social media, newly coined words and phrases get swiftly spread globally, some of them originating from hashtags. Analyzing neologisms coined in the pandemic, it is evident that their main aim is to cover new realities such as upperwear, Zumping (Zoom+dumping), etc. It is statistically proven that covid, coron (coronavirus) and quaran (qurantine) are the three most frequent stems. The pandemic-related neologisms are mostly closed compound nouns (covidiot, coronarave). Still spaced ones are often used as well (corona boner, corona bae). Taking into account a boom of coronelogisms worldwide, the Ukrainian language borrowed some either as loan translated (coronapocalypse � ���������������) or transliterated (covidiot � ������). At the same time, some widely used neologisms got translated using Ukrainian stems and affixes (������������, ������, ������������, �����������). Lexical changes, influenced by the pandemic and currently observed in English and Ukrainian, evolve rapidly and they have not come to an end.