The global pandemic COVID-19 has made a large difference in our minds and lives. Changes related to COVID-19 have had a significant impact on the Kazakh linguistic community as well. This paper considers the emergence of new concepts associated with greetings, color, education and linguistic changes in Kazakh linguistic society during COVID-19. The main purpose of this study is to show that some concepts related to greeting, education and learning, and ways of using colors have new content and a new quality. The research findings revealed that new words related to greetings, colors, and education had come into the language by the calque (translation-loan) method, and the elements of the English language indicate the flexibility to update the language structure. The study showed the emergence of new calque phrases caused by COVID-19, such as shyntakpen amandasy, kyzyl aymak, sary aymak, zhasyl aymak, ZOOMga shygu, and ZOOMmen otkizu; some of them have new semantic characteristics.

This article discusses lexical and semantic changes during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this article, we describe semantic shifts, new concepts, and neologisms associated with the COVID-19 pandemic based on the results of an associative survey. A total of 142 respondents voluntarily participated in our online survey. The term ‘coronavirus’ was taken as a stimulus word. Respondents had to answer what colour and number the word ‘coronavirus’ is associated with. The results of the study show that the stimulus ‘coronavirus’ in the minds of people activates the colours red, green, black, blue, yellow and very weakly causes associations with brown, white, gold, purple, colourless, as well as the frequency of the number 19. Additionally, according to the results of the study, it can be said that during the COVID-19 pandemic, negative meanings of colourative vocabulary were actualized (except green, because this colour began to symbolize safety), and numbers and some new concepts that have a nonpositive colouring appeared.