Although speakers might not be aware of it, especially if the word is in use for decades, genericized words are numerous in almost every language… But what exactly are genericized words and how do they enter a language?

Genericization (or genericide) is when a trademark becomes so successful that  people start using its name to describe the product in general and not that specific brand. It is mostly something that occurs when the market for a product is not fully developed, ergo people start referring to that new, one of a kind product by its brand name instead of its generic name. Eventually, some brands may even lose their rights to the trademark due to the general usage of it. This usually happens when people are unaware that they are confusing a trademark with the generic term for a specific product. A brand name’s meaning is now broader than that specific brand, but rather takes up the place of a generic term in that language. In our modern world, there are not many new cases, considering the fact that there are so many options and competitors, thus people are unable to strongly attach meaning to only one brand. But in the past, due to the limited number of products, that is exactly what the majority would do – they would eventually start genericizing, without even noticing.

Slavic countries were an adequate place for genericization. Being more or less isolated from the rest of the world during the20th century, there were only a limited number of products offered to the people, thus Slavic attachment to those products developed quickly.

According to the corpus of Czech, the word luxovat, meaning “to vacuum”, is used mostly in spoken language. It derives from a vacuum cleaner model LUX 1 from the Swedish company now called Electrolux, but it eventually stayed in the language as a verb and a noun – although a verb is more frequent. In the last 20 years, the frequency of its usage only grew. The word was first introduced to Czechspeakers around 1968, but its usage was still extremely rare up until the 90s, precisely 1994, when the terms luxovat and vysávat were almost equal (Chart 1). Today, in spoken language, both terms are used, but written language still prefers vysávat. This is the case with almost any genericization, spoken language accepts it quicklier than written.

Another case of genericization is found in Slovene – superge (sports shoes, sneakers). This word comes from an Italian brand Superga that was established in the early 20^th century. Through time, it became adequate for spoken as well as written language; and today, it has a neutral connotation. The frequency of its usage is, however, dependent on the area – Ljubljana is, for example, closer to Italy and therefore, the word would be more frequently used than in Prekmurje, which is more under the influence of Austria so the word superge would not be used that often.

In Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian, the frequently used word for calculator comes from a brand name Digitron, a Croatian company who was the first to introduce Europe to the pocket calculator in 1971. The word is often used, however, kalkulator somehow managed to stay in the language as well.

There are, of course, words that are used in all (Slavic) languages and originally represent a brand name. Words like aspirin, vaseline, gramophone, jacuzzi, ping-pong, tabloid and lots of others are all used on a daily basis, without us even realising that they represent a trademark. As I stated at the beginning, there are more and more things available right now, thus genericization might not happen as often as it used to. Despite this, I’m still confident that brand names are always going to be a part of all of our languages.