Neologisms on Facebook

In this paper, we present a study of neologisms and loan words frequently occurring in Facebook user posts. We have analyzed a dataset of several million publically available posts written during 2006-2013 by Russian-speaking Facebook users. From these, we have built a vocabulary of most frequent lemmatized words missing from the OpenCorpora dictionary the assumption being that many such words have entered common use only recently. This assumption is certainly not true for all the words extracted in this way; for that reason, we manually filtered the automatically obtained list in order to exclude non-Russian or incorrectly lemmatized words, as well as words recorded by other dictionaries or those occurring in texts from the Russian National Corpus. The result is a list of 168 words that can potentially be considered neologisms. We present an attempt at an etymological classification of these neologisms (unsurprisingly, most of them have recently been borrowed from English, but there are also quite a few new words composed of previously borrowed stems) and identify various derivational patterns. We also classify words into several large thematic areas, "internet", "marketing", and "multimedia" being among those with the largest number of words. We believe that, together with the word base collected in the process, they can serve as a starting point in further studies of neologisms and lexical processes that lead to their acceptance into the mainstream language.