Lexical neography in modern Norwegian

This article presents a short history of Norwegian neography and some of the problems in the field of lexical development. Norwegian linguistic purism has unfortunately led to a negative perspective on loanwords, and for a long time there was little neography in Norwegian lexicography. When registration of neologisms was initiated, the methodology and coverage was insufficient. This article presents a classification of neologisms and a new method of semi-automatic identification of neologisms from the Norwegian Newspaper Corpus (NNC). Some of the results show that the overwhelming amount of new words in Norwegian are inherited words, mostly compounds, and that genuinely new words are fairly rare.

Published online: 23 March 2012
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.49.10fje