The influences of the 21st century in the academic field

    During my years of study at the university, my forces were focused on the changing of the language, which depend, of course, on the changes in the society, technology, etc.
  So, I would like to expose here the conclusions of my research paper  and, I think, it will be a helpful source for those who make researches in the lexicology field. My research is a demonstration of the language's changing through the lots of neologisms introduced by the academic field.

  At the present moment English is developing very swiftly. Given the diversification of the English language in the twentieth century, and the sheer increase in the number of people using it, it would be surprising if it had not grown lexically. On top of that, the century’s scientific discoveries and technological developments kept up a constant demand for new vocabulary. In its first decade, for instance, English had to provide the basis of a wholly new terminology for both science and technology. The influx of new words has never been more rapid than in the last few decades of this century. These words or phrases are created to describe new scientific hypotheses, discoveries, or inventions. In this way, every innovation in the field of science leads to an innovation in language, i. e. to a new word, a neologism.

The closest connection between language and society has always been articulated by the numerous changes in the society and science. This fact deals with the need of forming new words.  Neologisms  form  a  highly  relevant  linguistic  category  for  many  reasons  –  they  are  the elements that make  a language living  and  dynamic rather than  dead, they  are indicative  of language change, they form a serious obstacle in computational analysis and translation, and they help to show productive morphology of a language. New words enter the language every day, and words cease to be used.

During our research we noticed that neologisms are an important part of the academic language. Nevertheless we could not find a scientific research which could have the aim to underline the development of neologisms in the academic field. Thus, we made some connections between language and the academic, scientific world. FP7 is an international programme which helped me to present the development of neologisms during 20^th century. While referring to FP7 we should speak about a professional academic language. Academic neologisms are new words generated by different institutions, programmes and development of science and technology. The language used in the field of FPs has an important influence upon English, because these new formations introduced by FPs are included in written papers and regulations, guides and work programmes, thus being used as specific terms. Furthermore, scientists, research and development actors, managers and even politicians, use these new terms in their written and oral communication so that FP terms are shared by the entire academic community of the European Research Area, as well as of the Third Countries.

The greatest number of neologisms created by FP7 came into being through a type of word-building highly productive in all spheres of human activity, the academic one included - Shortening, namely acronyms. Beside Acronyms, FP language enriches the academic field through ellipsis. These types of word building underline FP7 language and make it different.

The language of FP7 is not slang, because FP7 terms are spoken by the whole academic field, while slang is used by people with the same interest and, the slang has a metaphorical connotation. Professional slang as well as FP7 language is represented by words which must be “decoded”. At the same time language of FP7 spreads through the society, but the slang remains to be used by the circle where it was created and understand. 

A special focus in my thesis was on the way FP terms are taken over to Romanian. This part of our research is an important one, as Republic of Moldova, has become this year a country Associated to the FP7. Subsequently, the use of FP terms in academic Romanian is going to increase. Since there is no one single mechanism of reflecting the new meanings in Romanian we analyzed the way neologisms were assimilated to Romanian. Many of the English loanwords present in Romanian today can be described as cultural borrowings. This means they have entered Romanian together with the concepts, things, processes they designate, presenting the advantage of brevity, international character and lack of synonyms in Romanian. Speaking about FP7 terms, the most frequent translation patterns giving birth to new meanings in Romanian, as reflected in the regulation documents, are the types generating new terms in FP7.

We noticed that the majority of FP terms which are used in Romanian are translated in such a way to keep the meaning. As a consequence what results in Romanian is what we call semantic calques.

http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/home_en.html