Comparative culture linguistics analysis of German and Russian words and anti-words of the year

Abstract

This article provides a comparative examination of the words and anti-words of the year, which are selected during the annual campaigns, namely in Russia, Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The main direction of analysis is the study of the semantic processes occurring in these words associated with neologization, euphemization, change and augmentation of meaning. Many of the words analyzed in this article reflect different discourses of the respective societies’ life — political, economic and social. These discourses become dominant depending on what attracted the greatest public attention in the corresponding country during a particular year. Some of the words and anti-words of the year can denote events and phenomena that go beyond the borders of a certain country, which reflects the world processes of globalization. Others, on the contrary, are distinguished by pronounced national specificity, which makes it difficult to understand and translate them. The purpose of the article is to reveal the essence of this phenomenon; to determine the place of words and antiwords of the year among such overlapping linguistic phenomena as neologization, keywords, concepts; to outline the possibilities of their internal classification; to highlight the similarities and differences both between Russian and German-language words and anti-words, and between the German-language words themselves in different German-speaking countries. This research relies on such methods of analysis as the method of linguistic observation and description and the comparative method. As a result of the analysis, it was possible to establish that words and anti-words of the year have not yet received a clear definition in linguistics, that they have intersection points with many other linguistic phenomena, and that their classification can be based on different criteria. A contrasting study made it possible to distinguish not only similarities between these words in different societies, due to extralinguistic reasons, but also differences explained by the countries’ internal problems and the desire for linguistic originality.

Keywords:

cultural linguistics, contrastive lexicology, Word of the year, Anti-Word of the year, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Russia