"Renaturation" is the Word of the Year 2024

The Unword of the Year at the 25th anniversary of this election was "Volkskanzler" (People's Chancellor) and the Youth Word was "heast". "Lugner is immortal" was chosen as the positive phrase of the year, while the negative counterpart was "Euer Wille geschehe" (Thy will be done).

This year's election saw 10,434 voters participate (pre-election 2,734, election 7,700). There were 1,229 suggestions submitted for the individual categories of the election. The word "Renaturierung" managed to garner 24 percent of the votes. The jury emphasized that this measure, which refers to the return of primarily agriculturally or industrially used areas and waters to a near-natural state, is "a politically highly charged word".

This became evident after the Austrian Minister for Environmental Protection, Leonore Gewessler (Green Party), "made a decisive contribution to the adoption of the EU Renaturation Law. This led to criminal complaints from the coalition partner and the assertion that there would be a breach of the constitution. However, the ÖVP's complaint was dismissed by the WKStA."

Word of the Year: "Renaturierung" ahead of "ChatGPT"

The other podium places went to the AI program "ChatGPT" (18 percent), closely followed by "Swiftie" (16 percent), the fan term for followers of US singer Taylor Swift, whose concerts in Vienna this year had to be cancelled due to a terror alert.

In the Unword of the Year, "Volkskanzler" (People's Chancellor) (34 percent) took the victory, the self-designation Herbert Kickl (FPÖ) used in case he becomes the next Federal Chancellor. "In the 1941 Duden, 'Volkskanzler' is defined as 'designation for Hitler expressing the connection between people and leader'", the jury stated. It became the Unword of the Year "by resorting to forgotten Nazi terminology, which stylizes Kickl as the (new) leader and the Austrian population as his people." This was followed by the Arabic-derived "Talahon" (27 percent) "due to its aggressive and misogynistic usage" and "Remigration" (13 percent). "Heast" meanwhile made it with 17 percent of the votes to the Youth Word of the Year, followed by "cooked", which is mainly used for hopeless situations (I am "cooked": I am done) and "Aura".

Lugner Immortalised in Quote of the Year

The Quote of the Year was "Lugner is immörtal" (29 percent), a "play on words in reverence to the well-known builder Richard Lugner, who died this year", the jury said, who chose the "two-line quote as the Quote of the Year because of its special linguistic quality". This refers both to Lugner's nickname "Mörtel", and the English word "immortal".

The Misquote of the Year is "Euer Wille geschehe" (Thy will be done). The "modified quote from the Lord's Prayer, which Herbert Kickl (FPÖ) used in the election campaign and thereby (under protest from the Catholic Church) created a religious aura" received 47 percent of the votes. The election was conducted by the Society for Austrian German in Graz with the support of the APA - Austria Press Agency.

A review of "25 Years of Austrian Word of the Year", the subtitle of the publication by Rudolf Muhr, is provided by the report "Word in Time - Time in Word". It recounts how the election and participation in it has evolved and how the candidates for the words, unwords, youth words, the positive and negative quotes of the year are determined. The book also contains an archive of all candidate words and quotes as well as the results in all categories. A chapter is also dedicated to the semantic analysis of the words and unwords.

(APA/Red)

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