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The rapidly-spreading infectious disease known as Covid-19 has created a global debacle which triggered the creation of a specialised language to reflect the new situations that have suddenly become part of people's lives. The goal of the present investigation is to describe the linguistic innovations that entered the lexicon of Englishes across the globe. This corpus-based study aimed at describing the meanings and word-formation processes of the trending pandemic-related revitalised and newly-formed compounds and blends in L1 and L2 English varieties. The findings of the current study have clearly displayed that the lasting effects of the pandemic are left indelibly in the lexical innovations introduced in language. Not all pandemic-related words will become permanent in the word stock of any given variety. However, given the long-lasting implications of COVID-19, documenting the nature of language upheaval during the pandemic and its contribution to the vocabulary of first and second language English varieties is of utmost importance.
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Wars and conquests have always opened the floodgates of new words and meanings into the lexicon of the English language. Another kind of war that opens the floodgates for the passage of neologisms into the English language is the war on health during epidemics or pandemics. The present study utilized the News On the Web (NOW) corpus of English-corpora.org to (1) produce a word-list of COVID-19 pandemic language classified as medical, economic, political, and psychosocial lexemes; (2) identify the word-formation processes operating on the COVID-19 related vocabulary, and (3) determine which words are prevalent and unique in L1, L2 Asian, and L2 African varieties of the English language based on their occurrences in the corpus. The study identified 590 pandemic-related words drawn from the News on the Web (NOW) corpus dating from January 2020 to October 2021. The psychosocial category of the pandemic lexicon constitutes the biggest category of words identified from the corpus. The word-formation processes that operated in the production of the pandemic lexemes are compounds, blends, affixation, acronyms, and back-formation. L1 countries have the highest number of pandemic neologisms, prevalent or high-frequent pandemic lexemes, and unique word combinations. People produce neologisms as a coping mechanism to overcome various stressors and reflect their pandemic-related experiences.