The Danish Vocabulary in the time of Corona

Abstract

From various analytical angles, this article gives insights into the way the vocabulary of Danish evolved in (roughly) the first year of the coronavirus pandemic.

We provide an overview of the words that came into Danish or could be said to be revitalised because of the Covid-19 crisis, i.e. of Danish corona related words. The words are primarily extracted from the general corpus of The Danish Language Council (+4.3 billion words; primarily media text). We classify the more than 150 corona related words by providing analyses of (i) form, (ii) ideational meaning and – where applicable – (iii) interpersonal value. In a general way, our analyses build upon Halliday’s idea of “lexis as most delicate grammar” (1961/2002), and our analyses (of similarities and differences) are mapped in system networks/paradigms.

While our study can indeed be regarded as a systemic functional study, it might not – at first sight – resemble a truly social semiotic study, as we set out from a list of words with no immediate co- or context (cf. e.g. Hodge & Kress, 1988, p. 12). However, from a more general, systemic overview, we scrutinise some of the most used words by analysing the semiotic history of the compound word samfundssind (community spirit) and the usage of the nominalisation restriktion(restriction). These words were some of the most frequently used words in Denmark during the pandemic.