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Study conducted by means of INTEGRUM™ Monitor: revealing the word which symbolizes the year 2009.
At the end of 2009 the open contest to define the word - symbol of the year was conducted in the Russian network. The voluntary site Imhonet and Center of the Russain Language Development were the organizers of the contest. The results of the voting are the following:
The winners of the year are the words: "antikrizisnyi" (anti-crisis), "zombojastschik" (television which makes a zombie out of a man) and "medveputia".
In the nomination "Neologism of the year" the following words beat: "nehot'" (state of the mood when one doesn't want anything), "brehlama" (advertising which is both lies and rubbish), "nana-technologii" (pre-election tips).
The winners in the nomination "Word about network" are the following : "googlik" (unit of popularity in Internet), "frendezh" (automatic expansion of friends list in order to impove one's rating) and "vamp'juter" (computer as a vampire) .
We decided to carry out our small study and by means of INTEGRUM™ Monitor find out which words from the listed above enjoyed the highest popularity in mass media last year, which of them were mentioned negativelly or positively and then compare our results with the outcomes of the open contest "Word of the year".
INTEGRUM™ Monitor is a tool which allows tracking the dynamics of references to objects in different mass media at a specific time period.
We set the necessary parameters and received the following results. Comparing the words, which are the winners in the first nomination, we found out that the word "antikrizisnyi" takes the leading place by the number of mentioning in mass media. Generally, this word is used together with the words "measures", "programs", "plans" and "strategies". This word is mostly mentioned in the group "Business references/ Analytics" and in Moscow, Kiev and St. Petersburg editions. The word "zombojastschik" is second-best by the number of references and the references are only negative. For example, in one of the articles "zombojastschik" (modern Russian TV) is set equal to "debilizator" (from mental debility) or they say, that "zombojastschik trained people to bad news".
Comparing the mentioning of words, that take the prize-winning places in nominations "neologism of the year" and "word about network", in newspapers and magazines we obtained the following results:
As you can observe from the graph, all these words are mainly mentioned in December 2009, just in the period when the contest took place. That caused the interest in press. There were some references to the word "nehot'" throughout the year. On the whole, we can make a conclusion that these words are not highly used in newspapers and magazines yet, generally they can be met in Internet in chats and forums and are used in conversational speech.
