From covidé (infected with coronavirus) to confinement (lockdown) and éco-anxiété (climate anxiety) to verdissement d’image (greenwashing), the pandemic and the climate crisis account for most new French words according to a study by the French daily Le Monde, reports The Guardian.
But if 28% of recent additions are essentially English, according to an analysis by the paper, nearly half are French coinages, demonstrating what it called the language’s “great suppleness, as well as the creativity and humour of its users”.
Le Monde studied the 514 words incorporated in the authoritative Le Robert and Larousse dictionaries over the past three years, finding the number of new medical terms had trebled to represent about 20% of all new entries.
“I had never seen one typology of words so overrepresented among our new lexical entries,” said Carine Girac-Marinier, the head of Larousse’s dictionary department. “Quite suddenly, a very specialist vocabulary was being adopted by everyone.”
As well as technical terms (asymptomatique, PCR), existing words were adapted – as in vaccinodrome, for vaccination centre, and confinement, with its logical corollary déconfinement, the end of lockdown. Whole new expressions, such as cas contact (when you’ve been in close contact with someone who is covidé) also emerged.
While social issues (including the inevitable wokisme) accounted for a slightly higher proportion of new words overall, the climate crisis and its impact on human activity provided the most neologisms and extensions of meaning, Le Monde found.