From Covid-free to coronapocalypse: Trendy neologisms and nonce words of the Covid-19 pandemic

This study explores a dataset of Covid-related terms drawn from the Coronavirus Corpus (2020) in order to examine the impact of the crisis on language development in terms of novel words employed in popularisation discourse, namely online newspapers and magazines. The primary goals of the study are (1) to establish the stability, recognition and reusability of Covid-19 novel words (i.e. whether they are proper neologisms or nonce words), and (2) to investigate their main functions and effects. Results from a discourse-based analysis show that, on the one hand, new compounds (e.g. Covid-free) and regularly derived words (e.g. post-Covid) are used to disseminate information about the Covid-19 crisis to laymen and non-specialists. On the other hand, novel blends and similar creative words (e.g. coronapocalypse from ‘coronavirus’ and ‘apocalypse’) often have the function of breaking the tensions created by a difficult, even catastrophic scenario, but may also be used in the context of hate speech, to criticise or attack others, such as people ignoring stay-at-home orders and public health measures.