Oxford Languages Tracker

Have you ever stopped to think about the words that you use today that didn't exist when you were a child? When I text someone on my mobile about what I watched on satellite last night, I am using at least three words that would have baffled the young me (I would have been very interested in the idea of watching someone on satellite - Sputnik had at least been launched, I can assure you).

But what you can see is that language changes. My language changes; so does yours, and so does the language all around you. New things are invented for which new words are needed (GM, monetarism, reality TV, ASBOs). Then sometimes we change the words that we use to talk about things that already exist. Binge drinking is a new word to describe a very old idea. Terrestrial TV existed long before satellite TV but we didn't need a special word for it until satellite TV arrived.

These new words are very interesting to people like me who write dictionaries, because dictionaries should always try to include the words that people need - and new words have usually been coined because people need them. New words are also very interesting because they give you a picture of one of the ways that languages change (and everybody has an opinion on that).

Oxford has a long history of looking closely at the English language but here I would like to tell you about Oxford Languages Tracker which is our way of keeping track of the new words that pour into other modern languages.

What is the Oxford Languages Tracker?

For over 150 years, Oxford University Press has been at the forefront of dictionary making, and our in-depth language research is justly famous. Now, this multi-million-pound research program contains a new thread, the Oxford Languages Tracker, which enables us to track the latest developments across a range of modern languages, including French, German, Spanish, and Russian, in the most effective way.

It is a programme that helps us track down new words as they arrive in some of the key modern languages. Because of our English language resources such as the Oxford English Corpus, we know more than anyone else about the ways that English is changing (and we track all the GMs and ASBOs and bling as they become common). But other languages are changing too, often for the same reasons that English changes. Here are some of the ways that languages change:

• New objects and ideas arrive for which a name is needed
• People are influenced by other cultures
• There are changes in the ways that people use the existing words in a language.

How does the Oxford Languages Tracker work?

We have teams of language experts who read the media in their target language each day. They read newspapers, magazines, and websites published in the target language (and for a language such as Spanish that would include publications from South America, so it is a really international task).

As they read, each of the 'language trackers' looks for any word or phrase that seems new. They then check it against our large bilingual dictionaries to see if it is already there. If it's not there, they note it down, say where they saw it and check how many times it appears on the Internet (because we are most interested in new words that are both new and frequently used). The package of information about all these potential new words is sent each month to our dictionary editors. The editors look at the information to decide which words should be added to our dictionaries.

New editions of dictionaries are usually published every three or four years, but you don't have to wait that long to see the new words from the Oxford Languages Tracker because we also add them to our online dictionaries on the Oxford Language Dictionaries Online website. The dictionaries here are our top-of-the-range bilingual dictionaries and the online editions are being continuously improved, with hundreds of new words added to the site every six months.

Who are the Oxford Languages Tracker readers?

Our 'language trackers' are all experienced language experts in their fields - teachers, lexicographers, translators - who are bilingual in English plus their target language. They may be native speakers of English or of the target language, but the important thing is that they have an excellent feeling for the target language. They need this so that new words stand out from the rest when they see them, and also so that they notice more subtle changes in language (such as the way that the spelling of a new word can change before settling on a final form). If you'd like to find out more about a day in the life of one of our language trackers, click here.

What have we found with the Oxford Languages Tracker?

Here are a few examples of words and trends that our language trackers have found:

• The recent world economic problems have affected all languages because you need to be able to describe a sub-prime mortgage in Spanish (hipoteca basura) or the effects of the recession on jobs in Germany (kahlschlag - which comes from forestry, where it originally meant 'clear-cutting').
• Borrowings from English: The use of English in international media, business and sports has brought several words into our target languages (although often with a change in meaning or use). Examples include: night-clubbeuse and globe-trotteur [globe-trotter] in French. Interestingly, there are also borrowings between other European languages that have nothing to do with English. For example гастарбайтер has been seen in Russian with the sense of 'migrant worker'. This is a borrowing of the German word 'Gastarbeiter' (which has the same meaning).
• Greener language: All countries in Europe have seen an increase in the number of terms that refer to ecological and 'Green' issues. For example Ökostromtarif in German is 'the rate paid for 'Green' electricity'.
• Different ways of seeing the world: Often, we find that the same idea will be described from a different point of view in different languages. For example, did you know that a beehive hairstyle is referred to in French as choucroute (Sauerkraut)?