An ecolinguistic perspective on the discourse of the Corona Virus

Abstract

Taking an ecolinguistic approach the paper analyzes how the corona virus pandemic has changed our lives and how people are talking and discoursing around the globe. The pronouncements of politicians and governments changed very quickly to accommodate to the new state of affairs. Employing strong language governments made their populations stay at home, to keep ‘social distance’, to prevent the spread of the disease. Very rapidly ‘medical’ talk of illness and death entered the public domain and was used by politicians. Medical experts like virologists and epidemiologists accompanied politicians on the media showing graphs and curves to explain what was happening.
Speakers used dramatic metaphors. There were war metaphors, and also disaster metaphors, like floods and tides, a house on fire to characterize how observers viewed what was happening. People constantly mentioned numbers and figures. Everyday discourse patterns were packed with medical and epidemiological terms and phrases. The pandemic discourse resembles Gramsci’s idea of ‘hegemony’. The dominating power of the pandemic has made us all party to this new hegemony. Daily news conferences about the pandemic filled the media and TV. Such a crisis is a favourable time for ‘good’ journalism, especially investigative work. Governments justify their actions by claiming to follow the advice of scientific experts. The tendency for academics to put themselves at the service of government is a well-known phenomenon, a form of linguistic co-opting.
Governments everywhere pitched economic orthodoxy to the winds. With talk about easing the lockdown the discourse began to change. German Chancellor Angela Merkel warned that Germany risked damaging its recent achievements in subduing the spread of Covid-19. The pandemic is an idea that exists in our social discourse and we talk about a phenomenon that actually exists as an external physical reality. The texture of everyday life and society feels unstable. So does the human position in the world. With the advance of globalization the risk of infectious diseases spreads. Some people see pandemics as blips rather than an integral part of history. They like to believe that humans are no longer part of the natural world and can create an autonomous ecosystem, separate from the rest of the biosphere. Engels’ comment on humanity’s hubris and expecting humans can conquer nature can serve as a cautionary tale. In ecological terms we need a non-hierarchical acceptance of all species, including humans as co-inhabitants of the natural world. This will not be easy.