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Climate change and its effects on the environment are among the most pressing problems of our time and are of concern to researchers and politicians as well as a large number of citizens; they are among the most frequently covered topics in the media. As a result, we are constantly confronted with new words – neologisms – that refer to this topic. Neologisms can be terms that are transferred from specialized language into our everyday language, but they can also be new words created by politicians, media professionals and other people in public life who use them to describe new phenomena, actions, or behaviors. This article compares the lexical processes used in French and German to create climate change-specific neologisms and outlines which procedures are similar in both languages and how the respective neologisms differ. The focus is on the creative potential of certain topic-specific word components, their function, and the range of content their use can cover.
