English Language Invasion of COVID-Terms: How the Pandemic Affects other Languages and Cultures

Abstract

The pandemic of Pandemics COVID-19 has encroached the world civilizations and has affected the basic human necessities through all the evil imagined. The invasiveness of the virus though will not last forever and people will forget the panic and the devastations it has caused over time but it’s effects on English language and culture and Other Non-English languages and cultures will remain forever. The regular habits, expressions, common phrases ,slangs ,greetings, eating, meeting, dressing, shopping, learning each and every human necessities and recreations are more or less altered or have found other channels to meet up the need. Naturally, hundreds of new English words have been coined or old words have found new meanings to cope up with the need to express the COVID situations and circumstances. These are rightly called as COVIDterms. These terms have enriched the English vocabulary undoubtedly. But the other languages are affected as all these English words willingly or unwillingly have entered into their vocabulary permanently having given no chance to create and use their translated or transliterated counterparts in native languages. It resulted sometimes in problem of expression and chaos in cultural identity to some extent as language and culture are intertwined. The present paper deals with this language invasion, the problem it has created to the native speakers in some Asian countries like Japan, Indonesia and India, European countries like Turkey and countries like South Africa; and it’s general discussion as the assessment of this effect in the long term is yet to be done by prominent linguists and philologists in times to come.