"REFUGEE" was selected as leading the Top Word List of 2005 recently released by the Global Language Monitor in its annual worldwide survey. It was followed by "tsunami", "Pope" and "Chinglish," which describes the "new second language of China".
Global Language Monitor head Paul JJ Payack said "refugee", which was frequently used to describe the hundreds of thousands in New Orleans, US, made homeless by Hurricane Katrina, triggered a debate on race and political correctness.
American civil rights leader the Rev. Jesse Jackson said using the term to describe the mostly poor and black citizens of New Orleans made homeless by Katrina was "inaccurate, unfair and racist". Language expert William Safire said the word more often than not is used to denote a person "who seeks refuge or asylum in a foreign country to escape religious or political persecution", rather than a person who simply seeks refuge from a storm.
"Tsunami", from the Japanese word for harbour wave, was placed second on the list of words. Payack noted that few would have recognized the word before the Christmas 2004 disaster in Southeast Asia.
Third was "Poppa/Papa/Pope" to mark the death of Pope John Paul II, followed by "Chinglish". "Chinglish"(Chinese + English) is fast developing as the second national language of China. As a mixture of Chinese and English words, "Chinglish" is the nonstandard English, which is not grammatical or does not conform to English culture owing to the influences of Chinese idiomatic way of saying things.
The next words were "H5N1" (the name for looming avian flu pandemic) and "recaille", a French word for riff-raff that officials used to describe rioters in France. That was followed by "Katrina" and "wiki". "Wiki" is an Internet buzzword (from the Hawaiian "wiki wiki" for "quick, quick") that describes collaboration software where anyone can contribute to the on-going effort.
Ninth was "SMS", or "Short Message Service", to connote the more than one trillion text messages in 2005. Tenth was "insurgent", which is described as a politically neutral term used to describe enemy combatants.
"Out of the Mainstream", used to describe the ideology of a political opponent, was the top phrase of year and "OK" was named the most frequently spoken word.
