Reinventing the English language has been, and still is, an important task for English speakers around the world, to develop the verbal creativity of the language, fill in the vocabulary gaps with newly coined words, or address situations never encountered in the past. Reinventing the English language has been done through pronunciation adjustments, and word repurposing, but also by conceiving new terms called neologisms. According to Merriam Webster, the word neologism itself finds its roots in French’s “néologisme”, itself stemming from Greek’s Neos, meaning new, and logos, meaning word. The first usage of the term neologize according to Ian Crouch is attributed to American Founding Father and third president of the United States Thomas Jefferson, as he said in an 1813 letter to John Adams “Necessity obliges us to neologize – The new circumstances under which we are placed call for new words, new phrases, and for the transfer of old words to new objects.” (The New Yorker).
As our civilization advanced scientifically, socially, and economically, neologisms have imposed themselves as the best way to describe a condition that probably didn’t exist in the past. That’s why their proliferation seems unabated nowadays, as we compare it to that of the 19th century for instance, especially in the case of American English. How are neologisms formed? What influences people to create new words? Do neologisms contribute to the expansion of English in the world? And if so, do we need other languages to intervene in the creation of new concepts? These are problems to be addressed, and although some people may argue that neologisms ruin the purity of a language in some way, these questions prove that these “novelties” are a sign of creativity and resourcefulness.
The dynamism of a given language is a phenomenon that can accurately reflect the contemporariness of a society. One would say this dynamism could be translated through that language’s corpus for example, but in reality, it is closely related to its lexicon’s richness, in other words, the number of neologisms created. According to Peter Newmark, the main figure in the founding of translation studies in the 20th century, a neologism typically passes through a process of three stages to be used and considered a neologism: creation, trial, and establishment (88). During the creation stage, the newly made neologism, or called protologism1 at this level, is still volatile; the word being recently proposed, the audience using it is still quite limited. The trial stage is the period during which lexicographers will observe whether this word will strike a chord in the public consciousness or on the contrary, will dwindle in the fading vocabulary of unused words and naturally be doomed to failure. Once the word is diffused and passes the observation period, it is stabilized and its usage becomes standardized after gaining widespread confirmation. Now, it is true that linguistics is supposed to be proper to the field’s specialists, nevertheless, creating neologisms, in particular, is not proper to a person’s nature or social class according to sociolinguists and specialists in ethnic dialects of American English Walt Wolfram. by and
In fact, unlike Latin-based languages such as French or Italian, anyone is free to propose new words, with only criteria for their actual integration into the common language is that people adopt them. American journalist and scholar H.L Mencken expands on Wolfram’s point by saying that anyone is capable of contributing to the language we speak no matter their background or the way they speak. He further adds that “each era contributed to American speech independently of when the words were created, and it’s the population itself that pushed them to the ranks, dialects have nothing to do with that.”(236-238). Early on after their independence, post-revolutionary Americans had to create new terms and expressions to describe their newly-tailored political system, therefore, the demand for neologisms for the political field was met in quite a short period. This has blazed the trail for other fields to coin words whenever the need was felt, and since then neologisms have been omnipresent in our daily lexicon. Neologisms come in different forms and senses, and in fact, Newmark categorized them into 11 different types: words with new definitions, collocations, new coinages, derived words, abbreviations, eponyms, phrasal, and words, transferred words, acronyms, pseudo-neologisms, and internationalismpiece of. We won’t go through the blueprint for each category, but one piece of information we must know about all these different types is that they.
