War on words: a corpus-based analysis of Indian political neologisms

In the realm of political war (election), language is the most powerful weapon. Political leaders and parties craft and deploy neologisms during their political campaigning and slogans. They always tried to use catchy terms to address a variety of socio-political issues. Newly coined terms or phrases are used in order to address contemporary issues, shape public opinion, rally supporters, and undermine opponents. This war on words is particularly intense during election campaigns, where every phrase can sway voters. This study aims to analyze political neologisms within the framework of Indian elections using a corpus-based approach for Bengali language. The study is conducted in three phases. The first phase focuses on corpus creation, which includes a political news corpus along with social media texts and comments. The second phase is used to identify the relevant political neologisms. The system utilized an n-gram model (for n=1, 2, 3, 4) to detect political neologisms. Finally, the identified neologisms are analyzed from a socio-linguistic perspective and documented a total of 327 new political neologisms. Additionally, a detailed description of the twenty most prominent and critically selected neologisms are presented.