This week, “unfriend” was chosen as the New Oxford American Dictionary’s Word of the Year. In multilingual circles, this quickly prompted many — including us — to ask the question, “How do you translate that?” According to major media outlets (including the Telegraph, MSNBC, and many others), the term originated with Facebook. So, we went straight to Facebook to see how these community translation veterans rendered this celebrated word into other languages.

The response? Well, apparently the news outlets got it wrong — “unfriend” is not an official Facebook term. Instead, the phrase used by the social networking site is “remove connection.” Ghassan Haddad, Director of Internationalization at Facebook, was kind enough to answer our first question by sharing the translations of “remove connection” for some of the top locales and languages, listed below.

Locale/Translation

ar_AR / ????? ???????
da_DK / Fjern forbindelse
de_DE / Verbindung entfernen
es_LA / Eliminar conexión
fr_FR / Supprimer la connexion
he_IL / ??? ???????
id_ID / Hapus Hubungan
it_IT / Rimuovi connessione
ja_JP / ???????
nl_NL / Verbinding verwijderen
pl_PL / Usun powiazanie
pt_BR / Remover conexão
sv_SE / Ta bort länk
tr_TR / Baglantiyi Kaldir
zh_HK/zh_TW/ ??????

While we were glad to receive the translations for “remove connection,” our linguistic curiousity was piqued, and we had to ask, “So, if not at Facebook, where did ‘unfriend’ originate?” According to Haddad, the term is used by many members of the Facebook community in the same sense as “remove connection.”

While it is unclear who first used 2009’s Word of the Year, people have been “friending” and “unfriending” each other since the advent of Livejournal. So, it is likely that the “new” term has been in use for about a decade, and that users from other communities carried this term with them from other online lands. Sound familiar? Language has been crossing geographic borders since time began, and society has always helped language evolve, despite the rules imposed upon it by the royal academies of language.

While linguistic purists groan and moan about this recent arrival and the possible loss of their cherished “defriend,” as humans build communities on the web, they continue to voice their opinions by making the linguistic choices that suit them best. This fact is at the heart of community, crowdsourced, and collaborative translation. As we wrote in our members-only report, “Translation of, for, and by the People,” it’s a practice that is not going to go away anytime soon.