Abstract

The great change that the Covid-19  pandemic brought in people`s life all over the world is accompanied by a linguistic change; people do not only use  a large number of terms belonging to epidemiology and medicine, but they have also coined new words/phrases or adapted the already existing ones, in order to cope with the situation. The language that has been created is a result of the fear they experience and of their desperate effort to survive in unprecedented times.

Adopting a qualitative and quantitative mode of inquiry, the paper investigates the newly created English terms - that invaded the media-, in an attempt of identifying their pragmatic role under conditions of social crisis. Considering that their production is the result of people`s creativity, we have also put our creativity at work and contributed new terms to the corpus already identified.