Metamorphosis of Telecommunication

COVID-19 is a contagious and deadly zoonotic virus that caused a global pandemic. Telecommunication use surged to allow people to lessen contact and stay connected during the pandemic. This study serves to discover (1) if the increased use of telecommunication spurred the creation of neologisms related to COVID-19 in the English lexicon, (2) how the frequency of the use and types of neologisms changes with time, and (3) what word derivation processes are employed to form them. A framework provided by four academic sources about covid-related neologisms and a corpus from the online forum r/Coronavirus were used. I analyzed posts from 2020 and extracted 10 posts from each month for a total of 120 posts. The part of speech, morphological derivation, and frequency of occurrence of each neologism found were documented, and data were compiled into three quadrimesters. 27 neologisms were found in the first quadrimester; all were nouns and the most prevalent word derivation technique was compounding, comprising 55.6% of the neologisms present. This is expected due to the English language’s lexicon heavy use of compounding for word derivation. As time passed from January to March, the number of neologisms increased by 350%, suggesting an upward trend in neologism creation with time. The use of coronavirus and covid(-19) are inversely related with time, the former’s use increases as the latter’s decreases, suggesting covid(-19) will likely be the dominant term in other quadrimesters.