Covid-19 forces us to take linguistic diversity seriously

This article was originally published in the digital pamphlet Perspectives on the Pandemic: International Social Science Thought Leaders Reflect on Covid-19 produced by de Gruyter Social Sciences.

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The Covid-19 pandemic has presented the world with a joint action problem like never before: how do you get close to eight billion people to wash their hands and keep their distance?

Mass participation is critical to the success of prevention and containment efforts. The most effective way to achieve mass mobilization continues to be through state action. But the fact that there are only around 200 nation states in the world but over 6,000 languages raises a conundrum: how can we ensure that everyone has access to timely high-quality information in their language?

For too long, state approaches to speakers of minority languages — whether indigenous or migrant — have ranged from benign neglect to forced assimilation. In order to gain access to the state and its institutions — education, health, welfare or the law — everyone was expected to speak the language of the state — English in the USA, French in France, Mandarin in China, and so on. As a result of such monolingual approaches, Spanish speakers in the USA, Arabic speakers in France, or dialect speakers in China have worse education, employment and health outcomes than their compatriots speaking the state language.

The Covid-19 crisis has brought such linguistic inequalities to the forefront as language barriers may compromise the timeliness and the quality at which public health information is accessible to everyone in the population.

The World Health Organization’s (WHO) dedicated information website on the novel coronavirus disease, for instance, is available in the six official UN languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish. The information is directed at member states, who are tasked with localizing relevant information for their populations through their national health authorities.

States have taken a wide variety of approaches to the needs of their multilingual populations. Some states carry on with their staunchly monolingual communications unchanged. A White House directive to remove bilingual English-Spanish public health posters from US courtrooms is a case in point. Preliminary evidence from New York suggests that this approach has disastrous consequences for the Hispanic population, whose Covid-19 mortality rate far exceeds that of other groups. This comes as US health workers are left without adequate procedures and processes on how to deal with critically ill patients who do not speak English.

Putting measures for adequate multilingual communication in place during the height of an emergency of such proportions is next to impossible. Therefore, one of the many lessons we need to learn from this crisis is to include the reality of linguistic diversity into our normal procedures and processes, including disaster preparation.

An example of a country that has started to learn that lesson is China. When the outbreak first started in Hubei province, medical assistance teams from all over China were confronted with the fact that Standard Chinese and local dialects are mutually unintelligible, despite the fiction of one single Chinese language long maintained by the Chinese state. In the face of the crisis, the monolingual ideology was ditched and within 48 hours, a team of linguists from Beijing Language and Culture University created a Guidebook of Wuhan Dialect for Medical Assistance Teams, Audio Materials of Wuhan Dialect for Medical Assistance Teams, and The Handbook of Doctor-Patient Communication. Plans are now underway to include the needs of linguistically diverse populations into all levels of the Chinese national emergency preparation, response, and recovery plan.

In the past, the linguistic disadvantage of minority speakers could be ignored by the mainstream. The Covid-19 crisis has changed that. In a situation where the wellbeing of everyone depends on that of everyone else, ensuring equitable access to information irrespective of whether someone speaks the state language or not is in everyone’s best interest.

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Make sure to download the full free open-access digital pamphlet Perspectives on the Pandemic: International Social Science Thought Leaders Reflect on Covid-19 and read all the other essays, too:

#1 Bryan S. Turner, Is Covid-19 part of history’s eternal Dance Macabre?
#2 Ingrid Piller, Covid-19 forces us to take linguistic diversity seriously
#3 Gurminder K. Bhambra, Covid-19, Europe, inequality and global justice
#4 Bent Greve, Preparing welfare states in the age of Covid-19
#5 Jillian Rickly, An uncertain future for the tourism industry in the wake of Covid-19
#6 Stéphanie Walsh, Matthews Don’t confuse constraints with confinement during Covid-19
#7 Stephanie J. Nawyn, The social problems of protecting refugees during Covid-19
#8 Deborah Lupton, The need for urgent social research in a Covid-19 society
#9 Monika Büscher, A great mobility transformation
#10 Anthony Elliott, What future for postcoronavirus societies?
#11 Sharon Varney, Engaging with complexity — if not now, when?
#12 Robert van Krieken Covid-19 and the civilizing process

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Language and communication challenges of COVID-19

For the full list of posts related to language and communication challenges posed by the COVID-19 crisis click here.