New Words in Greek and Russian During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The description of the facts of the lexical dynamics of the coronavirus period focuses on identifying similarities and differences in the linguistic practice of neologization of Greek and Russian languages. The features of the incorporation of loanwords and the subsequent adaptation of new lexical items in the modern socio-cultural context of these languages are considered through the prism of the impact of global processes. The research is conducted at the lexical-semantic, word-formation, and partially morphological levels. The material of the research was taken from lexicographic sources of modern Greek and Russian languages. The comparative analysis revealed processes common to both languages, such as vocabulary replenishment by borrowing from the same source donor language, and processes specific to each language, such as reborrowing in Greek in a different form or with a different meaning. Based on this analysis, we can conclude that most of the neologisms in these languages come from English, the donor language of the coronavirus lexicon in other languages. At the same time, despite certain similarities in the processes of penetration of new elements into Greek and Russian, the further assimilation of lexical units in each language has an individual character and features that often activate their own mechanisms of neologization.