Germans have a knack for stringing lots of words together to create new words. From Mundschutzmode to Coronamutationsgebiet, the pandemic has spawned a plethora of them.

Transcript

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

A few new words and phrases have been added to America's vocabulary during this pandemic - lockdown, social distance, face mask. But in Germany, they've coined something like 1,200.

ANATOL STEFANOWITSCH: My name is Anatol Stefanowitsch, and I'm a professor of linguistics at the Freie Universitat Berlin.

SIMON: That's Free University of Berlin. Professor Stefanowitsch says that the German language's propensity for compounding words is a key to this pandemic proliferation.

STEFANOWITSCH: Putting together two, sometimes three nouns to form a new noun - that's one of the explanations for why we find so many new words. It's just so easy to coin them. Many of these words disappear again after they've been used once, but some of them have stuck around, of course.

SIMON: There are lots of variations on face mask.

STEFANOWITSCH: Mundschutzmode - OK, so that's one of these long compounds where you have Mund for mouth, Schutz for protection and Mode as a term for fashion. So a literal translation would be mouth protection fashion.

SIMON: Or mouth condom.

STEFANOWITSCH: Gesichtskondom, yes. It's another compound that just puts together two words that are familiar and creates this novel image.

SIMON: Novel - yeah, yeah, that's the word.

STEFANOWITSCH: Another long one that you're going to like is Behelfsmundnasenschutz, an improvised mouth-nose protection.

SIMON: Some words are created to try to frame the pandemic politically, as in this face mask variation.

STEFANOWITSCH: And it's the word Maulkorb, muzzle, and that has enabled certain people who are critical of the actions that the government has taken to curb the pandemic to portray adherence to sensible public health measures as an act of submission under an authoritarian government. So that's been a stroke of genius from their perspective.

SIMON: Professor Stefanowitsch says only a small fraction of these new pandemic words will likely make it into the dictionary. His vote is for the ones that are most precise.

STEFANOWITSCH: Kontaktbeschrankungen, contact restrictions, and Ausgehbeschrankung, going out restrictions - those are interesting. I mean, one of the things that the pandemic has really shown us is that people have been trying to differentiate linguistically, trying not to use too strong a word for a measure, but also not trying to make it sound too harmless. And so I think those words, they're interesting because they show the function of language and the potential of language to create ever smaller distinctions and meaning to try to get things exactly right.

SIMON: And some phrases may stay because they're vivid. That's good for language.

STEFANOWITSCH: Lockdownfrisur, for example - lockdown hairstyle, referring to the fact that because the hairdressers were all closed, the people had these hairstyles that they wouldn't have usually had. Maybe some people are going to keep their lockdown hairstyles because, you know, maybe that's the first time they realized they look better with long hair or something.

SIMON: Linguistics professor Anatol Stefanowitsch in Berlin, who wants to make sure to remind us that...

STEFANOWITSCH: BJ Leiderman (speaking German).

SIMON: Needs no translation. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

Tags: Series: The Coronavirus Crisis