FEATURED NEOLOGISM:

Volontourisme: it’s a French neologism but also a loan translation from English. It’s a blend of “volontariat” (volunteering) and “tourisme” (tourism). The French Wiktionnaire entry (https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/volontourisme#fr) dates back to 2012, but it was first attested (at least) in 2010. I like this word not only for its form but also for its content: as utopian as it may be, it tells us that a real encounter between people can still take place and it shows the best face of tourism.

I am an Associate Professor of French Linguistics at the University of Verona and I have been working on neology since my Master’s thesis, which was about Italian borrowings in French newspapers. More recently, I studied neology in the French tourism sector and I created an open-access corpus called NEOTUR (https://dh.dlls.univr.it/corpora/neotur/). I am also interested in monolingual and bilingual dictionaries, their cultural dimension and the way they incorporate new words. Another research area involves translation studies and the challenges of rendering neologisms into another language. Link to my public page with publications: https://www.dlls.univr.it/?ent=persona&id=19989&lang=en.