‘WORDS OF THE YEAR’: REFLECTION OF ETHNOCULTURAL FEATURES OF LANGUAGES

Abstract

The article examines features of language representation in the national campaigns ‘Word of the Year’: in Germany, the USA, Great Britain and Russia. ‘Word of the Year’ shortlists linguistic units and points out words that are indicators and markers of the year, words that have had the greatest impact on the national linguistic and cultural worldview. The words of the year demonstrate the connection with the processes and events that are currently taking place in the world and in the country and which turn out to be the most important for a particular language community. In the process of choosing the words of the year in each country, fundamental is the words’ significance for a particular nation at a given historical period. ‘Words of the Year’ in different language communities differ in the subject matter, stylistic characteristics, structural and semantic features of linguistic units that contain encoded cultural information.