The Korean Neologism Investigation Project: Current Status and Key Issues

This paper reports on the Korean Neologism Investigation Project and discusses a number of issues related to neologism research. Since 1994, when the government of South Korea initiated the project, the use of the Internet and mobile phones has increased exponentially and the methods and scope of the investigation into Korean neologisms have been modified accordingly. This project consists of collecting all the neologisms that appear each year in news articles on the Naver portal using a Web-based neologism extractor (task 1) and examining the usage development of neologisms within the past decade using a Web crawler (task 2). As a result of task 2, the neologisms that occurred at least twenty times in the Web-crawled corpus, across ten articles or more, for five years or more over a span of ten years, are considered as headword candidates. Whether these constitute suitable criteria for lexicographic inclusion is also examined. This paper also examines how the results of tasks 1 and 2 are reflected in Korean lexicography by looking up high-frequency neologisms in four major Korean dictionaries, among which two are user-generated. The results of this survey confirm the crucial role of expert lexicographers and the value of the Korean Neologism Investigation Project in the lexicographic inclusion of neologisms.