This article offers an analysis of words meaning ‘a person’ found in the Kazakh press between 2008 and 2011. On the basis of the criteria distinguishing occasionalisms from neologisms, conclusions were drawn about the development of the selected words. Some trends have been observed in groups of words of different origins. The words created on the basis of Kazakh and foreign roots have a greater tendency to be assimilated by the language, they become neologisms with general linguistic usage. However, words created on the basis of Russian roots usually remain in the occasional lexical zone.
