"Do you speak Corona?": Hashtags and Neologisms since the COVID-19 Pandemic Outbreak

Abstract

With the current outbreak of COVID-19, our everyday lifestyle has changes thoroughly. Not only the economy, industry and health services witnessed major alterations, but even our ways of communication. This can be found in the linguistic changes that have occurred to the English language since the pandemic started. The main phenomenon witnessed is the appearance of new terms and expressions, which are analysed and discussed in this paper. The main aim is to identify these developments, followed by their classification using Krishnamurthy's framework of Neologism (2010). The dataset consists of over 5 million tweets collected between January and June, 2020, which is analysed both qualitatively and quantitatively. The result analysis indicated that these changes functioned as a tools of coping with the major changes that happened to people's lifestyles globally. It was observed that social media in general, and the hashtags in particular, had a significant impact on its spreading.