Merryn Davies-Deacon

Queen's University Belfast, School of Arts, English and Languages
Member of: WG1, WG3

FEATURED NEOLOGISM:

divulgâcher (French) – to spoil (i.e. reveal aspects of the plot of a story in advance). From divulguer, to reveal information, and gâcher, to waste/ruin. This term makes transparent reference to both senses of English “spoil”, and unlike many other French neologisms introduced as countermeasures against borrowing from English, it seems to have been relatively widely adopted by speakers in France.

I have mostly worked on the minoritised Celtic languages Cornish and Breton, but also have research and teaching interests in French. I’m particularly interested in what neologisms can tell us about speakers’ beliefs about the purpose a language should serve, including their attitudes towards purism, and how decisions around neologisms and borrowings intersect with other linguistic practices such as orthography and dialect use. https://pure.qub.ac.uk/en/persons/merryn-davies-deacon-2/