“Dana” has been chosen word of the year 2024 by the FundéuRAE, after the strong storm that at the end of last October caused serious flooding in the east and south of Spainand its use skyrocketed in the media during the last quarter.
As explained this Thursday in a statement by the FundéuRAE, a foundation promoted by the Royal Spanish Academy, ‘dana’ has prevailed over eleven other words, among which were ‘fatphobia’, ‘narcolancha’ and ‘woke’.
The choice of ‘dana’, according to the FundéuRAE, is also due to its linguistic interest and the doubts that its writing still generates among speakers.
The FundéuRAE emphasizes that what happened in Spain, with at least 231 deaths and multimillion-dollar material losses, “is added to other major climate catastrophes that have taken place this year, such as the floods in Peru, central Europe, the United States or Brazil.”
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‘Dana’ (written with lowercase letters) is the word that DANA has become, an acronym for “isolated depression at high levels”; and has been incorporated into the Dictionary of the Spanish Language in its latest update, published on December 10.
If it is used as an acronym it will be written entirely in capital letters, but it is already used as a lexicalized common noun written in lower case: ‘la dana’.
If the acronym is chosen, the plural is ‘las DANA’, not ‘las DANAs’ or ‘las DANAS’, and the spelling ‘Dana’ is not appropriate, only with an initial capital letter, unless it is the first word of a statement . Especially in Spain It is a voice that, as can be seen in the academic corpus, is used mainly in Spain.
From the technical field in which this word was born, it made the leap to the media and, finally, reached the general language and the academic dictionary. ‘Dana’ was already a candidate for FundéuRAE word of the year in 2019, without achieving it, but the intensity and frequency with which this meteorological phenomenon is repeated, the same with which it is reported in the media, has once again increased. put your name on the covers.
Each year, the Foundation chooses the word of the year after selecting twelve terms based on their presence in the media, as well as in social debate in the Spanish-speaking world.
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And it also values that these voices have some interest from a linguistic point of view: A curious formation, a meaning or a writing that generates doubts among the speakers. The FundéuRAE announced this year’s election in a statement and will provide images that illustrate the word of the year that have been provided by the EFE Agency.
This year’s winner was chosen from eleven other candidates: ‘hallucination’, ‘mud’, ‘fatphobia’, ‘inquiokupa’, ‘mena’, ‘micropiso’, ‘narcolancha’, ‘pellet’, ‘reduflation’, ‘touristification’ ‘ and ‘woke’. This is the twelfth time that the Foundation has chosen its word of the year. The previous winners were ‘escrache’ (2013), ‘selfi’ (2014), ‘refugee’ (2015), ‘populism’ (2016), ‘aporophobia’ (2017), ‘microplastic’ (2018), ’emojis’ ( 2019), ‘lockdown’ (2020), ‘vaccine’ (2021), ‘artificial intelligence’ (2022) and ‘polarization’ (2023).
EE