Neology: Indicator of the vitality of a language and its culture

Abstract

Journalistic speech, mainly written press, because of the permanence provided by printed text, is suitable for the study of the phenomenon of neolexia. The pages of the press presuppose, therefore, a rich source of representative linguistic uses of the general language, among them neologisms. For that reason, newspapers are currently seen as the main source of identifying neologisms (Estornell, 2009). In this respect, in Colombia there are studies being done to register correctly the neologisms that appear in large-circulation newspapers like ElTiempo and ElColombiano and, in the present case, in Alma Máter, the newspaper of the Universidad de Antioquia. The results of this study try, in general, to contribute to the development of research of neology in the country, based on the registration of new words found in the newspaper Alma Máter. In particular, a corpus is constructed from the study of Alma Máter which allows for an analysis and description of the main formation methods and characteristics of the found neologisms and, with the results of the search, tries to favor the creation of a data bank of Colombian Spanish variant neologisms.