Grammatical Gender of COVID-Xenisms

This text deals with the theme of neologisms that emerged as new words or updated their semantic scope during the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, the expressions burnout, COVID, long-COVID, COVID-drive, fake-news, hoax, lockdown, remdesivir (rendesivir), webinar and zoonosis were analysed. The aim of the research was to monitor two factors associated with them: their general knowledge by native speakers of different Portuguese-speaking nationalities and their morphological integration in the Portuguese language. The study was based on a survey distributed in March and April 2021 and on six sociolinguistic factors: nationality, residence, sex, education, age, and preferred media. Of these factors, the most relevant were the diatopic and the educational ones with regard to the degree of (un) knowledge and the oscillation of the grammatical gender of the neologisms in question, which usually occurs, in real use, despite their integration in the dictionaries. Based on the collected data, we propose to calculate the generic oscillation coefficient and degree that should contribute to the most complete and effective lexicographic treatment of the generically unstable words.