TY - JOUR
T1 - "Let's ride this out together": Unpacking multilingual top-down and bottom-up pandemic communication evidenced in Singapore’s Coronavirus-related linguistic and semiotic landscape
AU - Gu, Chonglong
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston 2024.
PY - 2024/5/14
Y1 - 2024/5/14
N2 - Access to languages is a human right and multilingual crisis communication is vital during a pandemic. Multilingual and (super)diverse Singapore features four official languages (English, Chinese, Malay, and Tamil), with English being a dominant lingua franca. Additionally, other minority/migrant languages are also spoken to varying degrees (e.g. Tagalog, Thai, Burmese, Hindi, Punjabi, and Nepali). Contributing to public health communication research, this study explores Singapore’s multilingual pandemic communication practices evidenced on its COVID-related linguistic landscape, drawing on real-world top-down and bottom-up signs (N = 128). Top-down signs in Singapore are found to mostly feature English monolingualism or the four official languages. In comparison, Singapore’s bottom-up COVID-scape manifests in more scenarios. The findings are aligned with Singapore’s linguistic policy and existing pre-COVID linguistic ecology. What is conspicuously absent is that minority/migrant languages other than the four official languages are rarely represented. Despite Singapore's relative success in the anti-Covid journey overall, this raises questions of inclusiveness and accessibility and suggests that the city state needs to get out of its linguistic “comfort zone” and use a broader range of languages in crisis communication, especially considering the possibility of disease X and other future public health contingencies. The wider significance and ramifications of the study are also explored and discussed.
AB - Access to languages is a human right and multilingual crisis communication is vital during a pandemic. Multilingual and (super)diverse Singapore features four official languages (English, Chinese, Malay, and Tamil), with English being a dominant lingua franca. Additionally, other minority/migrant languages are also spoken to varying degrees (e.g. Tagalog, Thai, Burmese, Hindi, Punjabi, and Nepali). Contributing to public health communication research, this study explores Singapore’s multilingual pandemic communication practices evidenced on its COVID-related linguistic landscape, drawing on real-world top-down and bottom-up signs (N = 128). Top-down signs in Singapore are found to mostly feature English monolingualism or the four official languages. In comparison, Singapore’s bottom-up COVID-scape manifests in more scenarios. The findings are aligned with Singapore’s linguistic policy and existing pre-COVID linguistic ecology. What is conspicuously absent is that minority/migrant languages other than the four official languages are rarely represented. Despite Singapore's relative success in the anti-Covid journey overall, this raises questions of inclusiveness and accessibility and suggests that the city state needs to get out of its linguistic “comfort zone” and use a broader range of languages in crisis communication, especially considering the possibility of disease X and other future public health contingencies. The wider significance and ramifications of the study are also explored and discussed.
KW - public health crisis communication
KW - COVID-19
KW - COVID-scape
KW - Singapore
KW - linguistic and semiotic landscape
KW - superdiversity
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85193059855&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1515/lingvan-2023-0107
DO - 10.1515/lingvan-2023-0107
M3 - Journal article
SN - 2199-174X
JO - Linguistics Vanguard
JF - Linguistics Vanguard
ER -