Peculiarities of choosing the “word of the year” by different linguacultural communities

Abstract

The specificity of every ethnic community is conceptualized and interpreted by community members through a series of cognitive processes; as a result, knowledge, that is acquired from the outer world and is initially non-linguistic, is given a linguistic form. This article analyzes how national languages capture emerging social, economic, and political phenomena, based on the choice of the “Word of the Year 2025” by different linguacultural communities. The present article examines the choice of “Words of the Year” in Germany, the United States, Great Britain, Poland, and Russia, in the aspect of synchrony and diachrony, partially. A comparison of the voting results for the “Word of the Year 2025” campaign in two Germanic and two Slavic languages reveals a trend toward reflecting an increasing number of global phenomena. The relevance of this work is due to the fact that the “Word of the Year” reveals the priority of social, cultural, or political perspectives in each specific case. By functioning as a “time capsule”, an officially chosen word (as well as a shortlist) provides a better understanding of the national linguistic worldview. By comparing the shortlists and the winners of the “Words of the Year 2025” projects, words and phrases that are common across languages are identified. The coinciding choices reflect shared linguistic and sociopolitical concerns about the same phenomena in the modern world. A distinctive feature of the English-language lists and nominees for “Word of the Year” is the presence of anthroponyms and their various derivatives, which function as proper names. The choice of the German-speaking community demonstrates its concern for the political and economic situation in the country across the world, while the Polish language attempts to reflect various aspects of society in its shortlist. In Russian, the main words and phrases of 2025 fall into three distinct ideological and conceptual categories, each reflecting the multidimensional nature of Russian linguistic culture.