Sociolinguistic aspects of the covid-19 infodemic : how is language used to transmit health information in Arabic and English

Abstract EN

The Coronavirus pandemic has affected all areas of life in a globalised world.

Infodemic has been present along with the Covid-19 pandemic since huge flows of information have been made available on the internet.

In this paper, we aim to explore how linguistic devices are socially used to create infodemic, translate information, and how the expressive and conative functions have been fulfilled.

To this end, some websites and social media posts are analysed to identify the infodemic patterns and the occurrence of coronavirus-related terms from a sociolinguistic perspective.

Some translation strategies related to the coronavirus context are examined to gain a qualitative understanding of information transmission sociolinguistic patterns.

It has been concluded that language creativity and diversity as well as the extensive denotative and connotative uses of linguistic devices are the main aspects of the Covid 19 infodemic, which reflects the major preoccupations of the time as well as the social, cultural and linguistic features of each society.