Abstract
This paper examines the discourse of COVID-19 (also known as coronavirus) in social media posts and argues that the mediated COVID-19 discourse in Saudi Arabia enacted a variety of voices and thematic discourses that cannot be fully evaluated without reference to the locality of the sociolinguistic semiotics of the speech community. It attempts to construct the various non-verbal multivocalities in written and visual COVID-19 discourse present in 24 texts obtained from Saudi social media platforms, namely WhatsApp and Twitter, during the COVID-19 pandemic in the months of February, March and April, 2020. WhatsApp and Twitter are chosen because they are considered the platforms most used by Saudis in Saudi Arabia (GlobalWebIndex, 2020a, 2020b). The study employs a socio-semiotic approach to the analysis of collected data following Kress & Van Leeuwen (1996), mediated discourse analysis (Norris & Jones, 2005; Scollon, 2001) and systemic functional multimodal discourse analysis (SF-MDA). The analysis aims at integrating the social semiotics and multimodal approaches to better understand the dynamic Saudi discourse on COVID-19. The discourse on COVID-19 has revealed the dynamic multi-layered nature of governmental, individual and public voices pertaining to COVID-19 multi-discoursal themes, novel multimodal resources and the specific cultural semiotics of Saudi Arabia. The findings of the study revealed that the COVID-19 pandemic mediated discourse is relevant to the local speech community diglossic situation, cultural semiotics, social norms and integrated national identity.
Highlights
The COVID-19 pandemic emerged in Wuhan, China in December 2019 and subsequently struck the world
The aim of this study is to address this gap in research in this area by examining different social media posts that include text, images, and Graphic Interchange Format (GIF) animations on various topics related to COVID-19 in Saudi Arabia which has one of the largest social media presences in the world
The current study provides an examination of the multi-voicing of COVID-19 discourse in Saudi WhatsApp and Twitter text-image posts adopting a Systemic Functional Multimodal approach
Summary
The COVID-19 pandemic emerged in Wuhan, China in December 2019 and subsequently struck the world. A Main & corresponding author eISSN: 2550-2131 ISSN: 1675-8021 This fear from the new pandemic is transmitted through different messages on social media, posted by government and health organisations, and by netizens. In Saudi Arabia, different social media platforms, including WhatsApp and Twitter, are fast moving towards becoming the most popular messaging apps which have the affordances to enable users to exchange different types of textual, visual and audio messages. How do these apps feature in COVID19 discourse in Saudi Arabia?
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