Russian and Chinese neologisms as a reflection of coronavirus era

The language as a social phenomenon reflects changes in the state of society in every specific socio-historical era, it is highly mobile, especially its lexical part. The language is subject to changes caused by extralinguistic factors. The changes that have taken place over a couple of years in the socio-political system, economic and cultural spheres in connection with the advent of the coronavirus pandemic have made significant changes to the language. It is noteworthy that the same processes simultaneously took place in different languages, perhaps due to the wide and often the same type of coverage of issues related to the pandemic in the world media. In many languages, some medical and military professionalisms transferred from passive to active vocabulary, new grounds for metaphor have appeared, some of the already existing lexemes have acquired new meanings. The concept “COVID-19” with a similar set of meanings, signs and associations have appeared in different languages. The modern stage of language development is characterized by the appearance of a large number of neologisms, many of which are rapidly gaining popularity and becoming frequently used. New words that appear in the language in response to the social changes attract the attention of linguists due to the scale and high speed of integration of new vocabulary into the lexical system. The article describes the processes that characterize the Russian and Chinese languages of the modern coronavirus era, primarily associated with the emergence of neologisms. As the analysis shows, a large number of lexemes have appeared in the Russian and Chinese languages, expressing certain aspects of the new existence of a person and society in a pandemic.