Journal of English Language Teaching

Lexical Metamorphosis: Tracing the Evolution of the English Language through Oxford Dictionary’s New Word Additions

Ayshwarya C N

Training Specialist and Communication Coach. IGNOU, New Delhi

Keywords: Dictionary, English Language, Linguistics, Change, New words

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Abstract

A language must evolve, in order to remain popular, relevant, and representative. The language needs to adapt to the time’s evolving realities and requirements. Languages that fail to do so, soon fall into disuse and are forgotten as they are unable to convey the zeitgeist of the age. Thriving languages constantly expand, incorporate, and include many new and emerging concepts, ideas, phrases, and words. English can be credited as being a thriving language, as it has emerged as the generic language of the IT age and has expanded its reach, penetration, and scope even as other languages have withered. Using the Oxford English Dictionary, this paper makes an effort to analyze the most significant development of the English language through the addition of new words in Oxford English Dictionary 2020. With the help of this paper, we can track the path of linguistic expansion and give a direction to the English language, and also provide inputs to the evolution of the English language as a global lingua matter in the IT era. An analysis of the words added to the Oxford Dictionary in 2020 would present an interesting snapshot of the directions in which the language is moving in terms of linguistics, morphology, usage, and representation.

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