Unfriend and Twitter – words of the year 2009
Linguistic choices for the word of the year reflect the mood of the year. They are indicators of how the English language changes and how it reflects a new word’s potential as a word of cultural significance, that year’s zeitgeist.
It was a very tumultuous year. So much happened. Obama… swine flu… economic collapses… and yet the words of the year 2009 put web based social media on top – a linguistic manifestation of the extent to which social media has become a mainstream part not just of the web fabric, but of our life.
Oxford dictionary has chosen UNFRIEND as the word of the year.
Unfriend – “To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook.”
The Global Language Monitor has announced that the result of its annual global survey of the English languagethat Twitter is the Top Word of 2009. The Top Words are culled from throughout the English-speaking world, which now numbers more than 1.58 billion speakers.
Twitter – a new form of social interaction, where all communication is reduced to 140 characters unfolds.”
It shows the increasingly central place of the web fabric in our life as the social network becomes a basic reality.
