The Oxford University Press has announced ‘Anxiety’ as the Oxford Children’s Word of the Year 2021.
For over a decade, experts and academic researchers in OUP’s Children’s Language team have analyzed the evolution of children’s language and how it is used to reflect their emotions and experiences. The research draws heavily on the Oxford Children’s Corpus—the largest children’s English language corpus in the world—which contains language written for and by children at over half a billion words.
Prompted by the widespread impact Covid-19 is having on children’s education and the growing awareness of children’s mental health as a key concern at home and in schools, we selected the theme of wellbeing as our research focus for 2021.
Surveying over 8,000 children from across 85 schools in the UK, we asked them to choose the top words they would use when talking about health and wellbeing. The results highlighted the widespread impact that lockdowns and school closures have had on children, with almost a quarter of all surveyed choosing anxiety as their number one word, closely followed by ‘challenging’ and ‘isolate’. However, ‘wellbeing’ and ‘resilience’ closely followed as top words, signalling children’s positive attitude in the face of recent challenges.
More information: https://global.oup.com/news-items/current/cwoty_21?cc=ua