Virus of Words:
How COVID-19 Amplifies Linguistic Disparities
Before the world went on lockdown in 2020 due to the spread of the coronavirus, widely known as COVID-19, everyone traveled during the holidays with worries of the flu rather than a worldwide disease. People could go out and socialize with their friends face to face without wearing a mask, and students could interact firsthand with their teachers and peers. Before the World Health Organization officially announced COVID-19 as a global pandemic, the first reported cases were announced in Wuhan, China, in December 2019. These cases began to emerge outside of China, with reports of infections among visitors visiting Wuhan from various nations. The virus’s affiliation with a specific region contributed to discrimination among those of Chinese heritage, promoting a misleading link between the virus and the Chinese population as a whole. Amidst the lockdown, schools closing, and COVID cases rising, the linguistic prejudice against Asians has also been increasing day by day. An analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic on Asians reveals that linguistic discrimination and language barriers have increased in particular settings such as educational institutions, the workplace, medical offices, and social media platforms.
Current events emphasize the importance of reflecting on our involvement in persistent and systematically racist societies; now, studies on linguistic discrimination have been striving to shed light on how spoken language and discrimination are linked. In the article “The Sound of Racial Profiling: When Language Leads to Discrimination,” author Valerie Fridland, a linguistics professor in the Department of English, discusses the risk of managing linguistic characteristics differently or as a whole, attributing comprehensive negative traits to them, and uses real-world examples such as the passing of George Floyd to demonstrate how language prejudice worsens the detrimental impacts of particular interactions. Fridland asserts, “Racial profiling is not just about what people look like, but very much also about what they sound like, and the credibility, employability or criminality we assign to voices has a very real impact on those who happen to speak (or even just look like they speak) non-standard dialects.” The author further explains how social identity and language are correlated and what racial profiling can look like beyond someone’s physical appearance. Racial profiling beyond a person’s appearance can also be applied to the increase of linguistic prejudice during COVID-19 towards people of Asian Americans and people of Asian descent because they are not only stereotyped for what they look like or their culture but also for how or what language they speak.
Emma Goldberg, a business reporter for The New York Times, in her article “When Coronavirus Care Gets Lost in Translation,” conveys the topic that the need for remote employment for medical translators has increased the difficulties faced by front-line physicians and patients who do not speak the English language. Goldberg asserts, “Communicating through an interpreter doubles or triples the length of a medical exchange, adding new confusion and anxiety to situations that are already stressful for patients and their families. And the conditions of COVID-19 care — the rapid pace at which cases evolve, the desire of hospital workers to limit the duration of their exposure to patients — create numerous obstacles to effective interpretation.” As Goldberg implies, there are many linguistic obstacles due to the COVID pandemic, such as difficulty understanding muffled voices due to the mask mandate, what people are saying, difficulty communicating with patients if they are not proficient in English, and language interpreters who have to spend a lot of time translating for patients remotely and in person. This conveys that public health knowledge is not easily accessible to deprived and marginalized groups, such as those with impairments, immigrants and refugees, and people of indigenous backgrounds.
Jerry Won Lee, a Professor in the Department of English at the University of California and an affiliate faculty in the Departments of Anthropology, Comparative Literature, and Asian American Studies, in his book, “The Sociolinguistics of Global Asia,” stated that the anti-Asian prejudices of COVID had an immediate effect on Asian communities and that this added an unexpected new dimension of importance to the study of spoken language in society and its consequences. Lee states, “A saying like “kung flu” in the eyes of some is a harmless expression, and perhaps to others, it is just a clever and memorable pun. But its utterance, especially from a podium with a large following and thus with potential for a large influence (such as that of the former US President), can inspire audiences to harbor fear and hatred toward peoples of specific backgrounds and, in some cases empower them to engage not only in verbal abuse but acts of physical violence.” Essentially, what Lee is arguing is that language can affect people negatively. There are metaphors such as the “kung flu” that have stemmed from the global pandemic that stigmatize the Asian community and change the bias and liability they are currently facing in the present from these linguistic terms.
Munyaradzi Mawere is a Professor and incumbent Research Chair in the Simon Muzenda School of Arts, Culture, and Heritage Studies at Great Zimbabwe University in Zimbabwe. Bernard Chazovachii is an Associate Professor and Dean of the Julius Nyerere School of Social Sciences at Great Zimbabwe University. Their book, “Covid-19 and the Dialects of Global Pandemics in Africa: Challenges, Opportunities, and the Future of the Global Economy” mentions the use of varying metaphors and how they shape the public perceptions of the COVID-19 pandemic and create controversy of meaning. The authors argue that “The scapegoating and blaming of China and Chinese nationals for the coronavirus has been part of the pandemic discourse since its outbreak” and that “These metaphors generate fear and become divisive narratives which stigmatize othered groups who are associated with the genesis and spreading of the coronavirus. In other words, such misinformation in public discourse about coronavirus disease triggers alarm, discrimination, and strife.” Authors Lee, Mawere, and Chazovachii, all state a few commonalities like the metaphors that have been derived from COVID-19, such as a ‘Chinese virus’, which they all support and deem as misleading and harmful since the phrase ‘Chinese virus’ implies blame for the Chinese people. That conveys that due to the pandemic, linguistic discrimination against Asian Americans has increased since then.
In the article “Linguistic diversity in a time of crisis: Language challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic,” Ingrid Pillar, a Professor at Macquarie University and an Australian linguist who specializes in language learning and bilingual education, claims since anyone can become an infectious carrier, actions to prevent and control the infection while reducing individual risk are closely linked to reducing the risk to society as a whole. Pillar is determined to come up with the needs of multilingual people in terms of public health information and how those requirements are being fulfilled or not. Pillar argues, “Most of the world’s 195 states operate in one or two national languages only, and linguistic minorities within those states – whether indigenous or migrant – face significant language barriers at the best of times. Around the world, the exclusion of linguistic minorities from fair and equitable access to social participation, including education, employment, welfare, or health, is common.” The author further mentions the obstacles posed by the pandemic, such as the language obstacles in how governments in various nations and areas communicate health data alongside other social services to linguistically varied people, analytical discourse research of political speeches, news stories, and social media posts, with an emphasis on stereotypes and prejudice connected to COVID-19, and challenges with bilingual vocabulary norms and interpretation in medical studies and health-related data. That conveys the long-term impacts of marginalized language’s loss of significance as a method for emergency communications.
In past and recent years, more and more people of different races, ethnicities, and languages are being discriminated against in a society that accepts more of a set standard. In December 2019, the first few cases of the coronavirus were discovered in Wuhan, China, and rapidly began to spread to different countries around the world. The origin of this disease is why we are now seeing an increase in varying forms of discrimination, mostly racism and linguistics, against people of Asian descent. As a society, we, as human beings, should be able to tell right from wrong and not only accept linguistic diversity but also take the time to understand people of different backgrounds. By accepting individuality and diversity, we can come together as one and take initiative on how we can combat linguistic discrimination.
