The Role of Neologisms in the Climate Change Debate: Can New Words Help to Speed Up Social Change?

Abstract

New expressions—or neologisms—continue to emerge in the discourse around climate issues (e.g., “flight shame”). Does the emergence of neologisms merely reflect shifts in sustainable attitudes, or can new expressions also speed up/frustrate social change? Building on literature grounded in linguistics and environmental psychology, we conclude that neologisms may have an important, yet underrated and not sufficiently investigated potential to influence the speed of social change. In this Focus Article, we first discuss the way in which neologisms facilitate the conceptualization of new ideas and thus increase awareness. We do this by linking contributions from the literature in cognitive linguistics on the creation and retrieval of concepts in the mind with work from environmental psychology on the adoption of sustainable behaviors. Then we employ cognitive and ecolinguistic frameworks to describe how new expressions support the introduction of different points of view for the interpretation of climate‐related issues. In other words, by bridging different disciplines, we explain how neologisms can facilitate or frustrate the onset of social tipping points. We illustrate these possible effects of neologisms with eight climate‐relevant examples (flight shame, greenwashing, light‐bulb minute, carbon footprint, carbon indulgence, global warming, climate crisis, climate change) coined or widely adopted in the English language between the 1970s and 2018. Insights from these examples can help activists, policymakers, and citizens to coin neologisms that contribute to climate change mitigation efforts from a communicative perspective.