Language-Internal Neologisms and Anglicisms: Dealing with New Words and Expressions in The Danish Dictionary

Abstract

ABSTRACT:

The Danish Dictionary, a corpus-based online dictionary, contains just over 100,000 entries. The dictionary is updated on a regular basis, with new versions published two or three times a year. Whenever an update is released, it almost always becomes the object of public attention. The media love new words and usually assume that a new word in the dictionary is also a new word in the language—a neologism. Of course, popular belief is far from the truth: many newly published words have been in the language for a long time but were perhaps too infrequent to be included previously.

Given their popularity, neologisms are obviously interesting for the dictionary staff, and in this paper I analyze those that have been included recently and consider whether special selection criteria should apply. The editors do not use a specific method to detect neologisms in particular but have various tools to assist them in finding lemma candidates in general, and they can also analyze the updates that have been published in recent years. I pursue both these approaches, addressing questions including the following: (1)

What broad types of neologisms exist and what are their characteristics?

(2)

How does pressure from English affect the vocabulary of the dictionary?

(3)

Are Anglicisms dominant or used increasingly over time as compared with language-internal neologisms? Does globalization promote the import of words from other languages, too?

Although the notion 'neologism' pertains to a range of linguistic phenomena, I confine myself in this context to words and multiword expressions as (potential) entries.