Wie ein Virus die Sprache verändert – Beobachtungen zum Russischen

Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged people’s thinking worldwide. Russia, too, has seen experts writing reports on the causes and consequences of the pandemic and citizens commenting on the restrictions on their lives, which they accepted or rejected. None of this would have been possible, if words had not been adopted, borrowed, modified, revisited, fitted into grammatical structures, or varied in their meanings. This article provides a first overview of such changes in Russian.