  In this paper, we present a study of neologisms and loan words frequently
occurring in Facebook user posts. We have analyzed a dataset of several million
publically available posts written during 2006-2013 by Russian-speaking
Facebook users. From these, we have built a vocabulary of most frequent
lemmatized words missing from the OpenCorpora dictionary the assumption being
that many such words have entered common use only recently. This assumption is
certainly not true for all the words extracted in this way; for that reason, we
manually filtered the automatically obtained list in order to exclude
non-Russian or incorrectly lemmatized words, as well as words recorded by other
dictionaries or those occurring in texts from the Russian National Corpus. The
result is a list of 168 words that can potentially be considered neologisms. We
present an attempt at an etymological classification of these neologisms
(unsurprisingly, most of them have recently been borrowed from English, but
there are also quite a few new words composed of previously borrowed stems) and
identify various derivational patterns. We also classify words into several
large thematic areas, "internet", "marketing", and "multimedia" being among
those with the largest number of words. We believe that, together with the word
base collected in the process, they can serve as a starting point in further
studies of neologisms and lexical processes that lead to their acceptance into
the mainstream language.
