From social distancing, flattening the curve, to multiple medical, social, and governmental words, the global pandemic has quickly enriched our language to include many words and phrases once exclusive to field professionals only. But language vocabularies have also stretched a lot, proving to be remarkably robust and adaptive as well. Here’s a list of some of the buzzwords that came to light in the past few months.
An analysis of new English words created during COVID-19
As language has a close relationship with human society, it can change over time in its development. Language can change and develop because the meaning of certain phrases changes in the context of language use (Strongman, 2017). Therefore, language is not dead, but it changes and develops itself over time and everywhere.
In any case, there are many possible causes for a language to change. It can happen because of the adaptation of developments and changes in the social life system, such as education level, culture, social, and technology mastery (Harya, 2016).
Likewise, language can also change because of social phenomena happening lately. Since 2019, there has been a pandemic of Coronavirus Disease 2019, commonly known as COVID-19. The transmission of this disease is very fast from one country to another and it‟s causing an outbreak in the world.
New English words created during COVID-19
New English words can be called neologisms. Neologism is a morphological process through which new words are formed in a language. The new words reflect the social and cultural conditions in the texts selected in the current research (Qaisar, 2015).
The results of this research show that the COVID-19 pandemic has caused a change in human language and social life.
