Word of the Year as a Cultural Concept in Media Discourse

Abstract

The article deals with the analysis of a linguocultural concept “word of the year” in the discourse of media communication; it studies the correlation of the concept with significant social events in the culture of Germany, the USA, the UK and Russia. The discussion that follows will explore the important historic events, the process of priorities shift, and emergence of new cultural values influencing on the language development, reflecting in the appearance of new lexemes and linguistic concepts encoded in the forms of Words of the Year. We observe that globalization in the modern world is the basis of mutual influence of different national cultures. The most obvious role is that of the English language, functioning in the USA and UK. The influence results in that modern English becomes a powerful donor for many other languages. The availability of mobile and Internet technologies, popularity of World Wide Web, especially among the youth, stimulate the process of lexemes penetration into various languages. The use of social sites as information grounds by media communication agencies contribute to forming of the common global information space and also dynamic global language discourse on the basis of the English language primarily.