Mapping the online language ecology of multilingual COVID-19 public health information in Australia

Abstract

COVID-19 and recent vaccination roll-out campaigns reveal the globally significant relevance and impact of language policies. Often only very few, dominant official or national languages are utilised for health crisis communication despite existing work and research showing the need for inclusive health communication beyond such policies. Therefore, in response to the ongoing concern for effective multilingual communication policy amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, we explore culturally and linguistically responsive communication on social media in Victoria and the Northern Territory, Australia. Here, we suggest that multimodal information drawing on a broader range of semiotic resources delivered by community members has the potential to reconfigure state-level language policy and reflect regional socio-cultural situations. As such, several recommendations are made for adapting language policies including broader definitions of qualified translators and interpreters and the development of crisis-specific communication guidelines sensitive to the place of creation and its linguistic and socio-cultural demographics. Such inclusive, bottom-up approaches can inform other multilingual contexts and policies catering to highly diverse populations such as many European countries, the United States and South Africa, among others.