Reflet de la pandémie de Covid-19 dans les dictionnaires de la langue française

Abstract

The Reflection of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Dictionaries of the French Language. Languages adapt to reflect changes taking place in the life of users. The COVID-19 pandemic, by its specificity, has had an enriching effect on the French language, which quickly created and borrowed simple and complex lexical units, a new specialized vocabulary reflecting the transformations that have occurred in the society. Medical terms like coronavirus (type of virus) and COVID-19 (disease caused by SARS -CoV-2) became a part of everyday conversation. New words and new meanings are usually added to dictionaries once editors have enough evidence to demonstrate continued historical use; therefore, they must be used over a significant period of time to earn their place in dictionaries. Based on the above, the question arises: how has the epidemic impacted dictionary editors? The present study attempts to investigate the new French words and expressions that emerged in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis and were added to dictionaries of the French language. The corpus collected within this study comprises neologisms (the concept of neologism can be misleading here, because the lexicography theory characterizes neologisms as words which have not been included in current dictionaries) from various fields, new words or expressions and new meanings which have been added to the Petit Robert and the Petit Larousse illustré and the online dictionaries Grand dictionnaire terminologique and Wiktionnaire. The French dictionary Le Petit Robert has added 26 new words and meanings to its 2022 dictionary, and 48 new words and meanings, from cluster to coronapiste (a cycle lane introduced during the COVID-19 crisis), have entered the French dictionary Le Petit Larousse 2022. The present study shows how French dictionaries have been able to adapt to the changes brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. During this health crisis, the French language has been extraordinarily dynamic.