The Birth of a New Language in the Pandemic

Abstract

The pandemic caused by COVID-19 has drastically changed people’s daily lives. The unthinkable has become a reality. It is hard to even imagine the return to 'normal'. The language, a subject to constant change, became much richer in a short time. Although not every term or neologism coined during the pandemic will get into future dictionaries, some certainly will, testifying to an era unlikely to be forgotten. This paper aims to summarise and analyse the lexical changes the language has undergone. Medical terms that filled the newspapers, both in print and online, soon entered the everyday language. The circumstances wrought by the pandemic influenced the coining of neologisms globally, but most originated in the English language. COVID-19 has also caused widespread pessimism, for everything people once took for granted was gone; however, some have found optimism in trying to defuse the situation by coming up with playful words prefixed by corona- or covid-. In addition to the abovementioned categories, a part of this paper is dedicated to sports metaphors related to coronavirus, used to better cope with the difficult and painful situation the world is facing.