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The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed language barriers in societies around the world. It has become obvious that the fact of linguistic diversity had not been incorporated systematically into emergency preparation and crisis planning.

As a result, the effectiveness of the pandemic response has suffered, and linguistic minorities everywhere have been struggling to access timely high-quality information. The consequences of widespread language and communication failures have been felt most heavily by the most marginalized groups.

Since February 2020, the language and communication challenges of the pandemic have constituted a major research focus of the Language on the Move team.

Research blog posts documenting our research in this strand are collected below. The research blog posts bring together research related to the pandemic not only as a health crisis but also as a socio-economic crisis. In addition to established researchers from over a dozen countries and on all continents, the posts also feature research conducted by Master of Applied Linguistics students at Macquarie University as part of the “Literacies” unit taught by Ingrid Piller.

The major academic output of this research strand is a special issue of Multilingua devoted to “Linguistic Diversity in a Time of Crisis” and co-edited by Ingrid Piller, Jie Zhang, and Jia Li.

The special issue was accompanied by two online symposiums hosted by Fudan and Yunnan universities. During these events, contributors to the special issue presented their research and discussed it with international experts from Australia, China, and Germany. Videos of the Chinese-language and English-language symposiums are available.

Videos of lectures by Ingrid Piller about “Linguistic Diversity in a Time of Crisis” can be viewed on the Language on the Move YouTube channel.

Research blog posts examining the language and
communication challenges of the Covid-19 crisis