FEATURED NEOLOGISM:

One of my favourite neologisms is the verb “yassificar” or “yasificar”. It is a word used in Spanish youth slang, particulary on social media, to refer to someone or something that is heavily made up or dressed up in a very exaggerated way. It also applies to heavily filtered images that look unreal. It comes from the English verb “yassify”, which in turn comes from “yass”, a variation of “yes” that originated in the LGBTQ+ context and drag queen culture. I came across this word in the corpus of my research, and it can be found on social media. Here is the link to the entry for “yassify” in the Cambridge Dictionary: 

Following a Bachelor’s degree in Linguistic Mediation and a Master’s degree in Foreign Languages for International Communication, I am currently enrolled as a PhD student within the Digital Humanities – Tecnologie digitali, Arti, Lingue, Culture e Comunicazione programme at the University of Turin and University of Genoa. In recent years, I have focused my research not only on the study of the Spanish language, but also on more specialized linguistic disciplines such as lexicology, lexicography, and neology. My current research project focuses on the study of neologisms in the Spanish youth language of social networks. Specifically, the objective is to compile a representative corpus that will allow for both quantitative and qualitative analyses of linguistic innovation within this particular language variety.