FEATURED NEOLOGISM:

My favourite neologism that I came across during my lexicographical work is the German neologism “Doppelwumms”. The word refers to a funding proposal announced by Chancellor Olaf Scholz in 2022 (through the onomatopoeic wording and the use of “Doppel-” (engl. “double”) with particular emphasis), which includes a 200 billion euro package of measures to reduce energy prices in Germany. I especially like how the word sounds and that “Wumms” is onomatopoeic.

I am working as a research assistant at the Leibniz Institute for the German Language in a project examining and documenting German neologisms. Among other things, this involves corpus-based lexicographic work on a new e-dictionary of neologisms in German. When possible, I also try to work contrastively within the project (for example, in a study entitled “Contrastive Analysis of Climate-Related Neologisms Registered in German and French Wikipedia”) as I have a German-French double degree. In my PhD-project I am examining semantic similarities among German neologisms and their implications for the relationship between linguistic doubt and language change. For more information, please have a look at my personal website: https://perso.ids-mannheim.de/seiten/pawels.html.