Abstract

Abstract: The starting point of this article has a social nature: neologisms appear to refer to novelties and to cover the expressive needs of speakers. As speakers consider language to be their own and express unformed considerations on new words, this article deals with some of the most frequent questions on this subject: What is a neologism? Are certain neologisms more neological than others? Why do neologisms appear? Are they all necessary to the same extent? What are neologisms in Catalan like? Does Catalan create neologisms or does it only copy them from other languages? The article comes to the conclusion that Catalan, like any other language, has lexical creativity and hosts all kinds of neologisms: stable and ephemeral, new and old, deliberate and unintentional, correct and incorrect, denominative and expressive, well-formed and transgressive.Key words: lexical neology, neologicity, society, lexical creativity, lexical interference.