The vuvuzela are the seemingly ubiquitous brightly colored plastic horns, said to have the potential to inflict lasting hearing loss because of the loudness and pitch of a typical vuvuzela (B flat below middle C, according to the BBC).
"Vuvuzela appears certain to achieve a place (or at least some notoriety) within the ranks of the English language. Vuvuzela has already appeared some 2,450 times in a recent search of the New York Times archive," said Paul JJ Payack, president of the Global Language Monitor. "That is quick a few citations for the 'first draft of history; even a quick Google search yields over 6,000,000 hits on the term.
The word vuvuzela itself is of uncertain origin. Some think it is related to the summoning horn, the kudu, for African villages. Others speculate it to be derived from an onomatopoeic Zulu word for the sound 'vu-vu', or a word for noise making, while many believe it to be 'township slang' for shower (of noise).
During the World Cup, the constant sounding of the vuuzela by the tens of thousands of spectators annoyed not only the players but also the television audience, who could not hear what was being broadcast.
A press statement by the Austin, Texas-based Global Language Monitor noted that the thresholds to cross into the English Lexicon include 25,000 citations meeting criteria for breadth of geographic dispersion along within a depth of media formats including the Internet, blogosphere and social media along with various formats of print and electronic media.
Since 2003, the Global Language Monitor has been recognizing new words or neologisms once they meet these criteria.
The group analyzes and catalogs the latest trends in word usage and word choices, and their impact on the various aspects of culture, with a particular emphasis upon global English.
English has become the first truly global language with some 1.58 billion speakers as a first, second or auxiliary language.
Payack examines its impact on the world economy, culture and society in A Million Words and Counting (Citadel Press, New York, 2009). The current estimate for the number of words in the English language stands at 1,005,939.
— On the Net: http://www.languagemonitor.com/
