The Language of COVID-19

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, language has been in the forefront of my mind because whenever I discussed current affairs with my significant other, I compare the language of my English-speaking friends to my non-English speaking partner. When discussing the philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt, Guy Deutscher wrote in his book Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages, “The real differences between languages… are not in what a language is able to express but rather what it encourages and stimulates its speaker to do from its own inner force” (Deutscher, 2010). This quote highlights the value of a theory like that of Linguistic Relativity which follows two notions: 1) language is relative and varies in expression and 2) linguistic expression influences how the speaker conceptualizes the world (Goldstein, 2015).  The expression of a culture’s stories influences how someone conceptualizes and experiences an event like COVID-19. 

According to Johnson-Laird’s situation models, the words we use change the mental representations of a scenario (Johnson-Laird, 1983). As an example, take the sentence “the paper is on the wall.” You would imagine a vertical page, but if you said “the paper is on the desk” instead, the imagined page would become horizontal. What we know about the words wall and desk changes our visualization of the paper’s orientation. If we applied this concept more broadly, our words also change how we envision social events. For example, the Japanese language uses the term ‘Amerika’ instead of ‘United States of America’. This distinction creates a unified view of the US rather than the view of connected states, so for someone like my Japanese partner, he sees a singular nation that currently looks scary with protests and high COVID-19 death tolls rather than individual states with nuanced policies and experiences. For me, phrases like ‘state lockdown’ enforce a different image than the phrase ‘American lockdown’. 

According to the word frequency effect, the regularity of a word influences the response to that word. These frequent words become primers (when an exposure to an event influences our subsequent response to a following event) for our minds, making us more open to content that highlights and uses them.  In Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Righteous Mind, Haidt defines six foundations of moral thinking: care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity, and liberty. Depending on an individual’s moral emphasis, each foundation changes what moral group we fall into (Haidt, 2012). Applying the situation model, our descriptive words describe our personal narratives influencing the moral foundation we lean towards. In left-leaning communities in the US (of which I tend to belong to), we often hear people discuss personal traumas increasing the frequency of words like sexism, homophobia, and racism which causes many left-leaning individuals to react towards the care foundation (distinguished by empathy). However, in right-leaning communities you hear words like liberty, freedom, and patriotism, creating stronger response towards narratives around the liberty or loyalty foundations.

As we can see, language changes how we visualize and interact with our world and what groups we place ourselves into. So how does this influence our perception of COVID-19? It goes back to the media we consume and the language we surround ourselves in. The line in Haidt’s book “[m]oral matrices bind people together and blind them to the coherence” is applicable to a stressful time like COVID-19. For left-wing individuals, emphasis on care causes us to be more prone to reacting empathetically towards the damage COVID-19 causes while my right-wing neighbors react more towards the damage restricting freedoms inflicts on people’s livelihoods due to their emphasis on liberty. None of us want harm done to others, but we instead emphasize harms caused to people differently. Dr. Tedros Ghebreyesus from the World Health Organization once stated, “We’re not just fighting an epidemic; we’re fighting an infodemic.”.  This infodemic largely roots into the cycles we trap ourselves in when we bind our moral matrices. 

In any social scenario, there is no entirely correct answer, but instead a variety of possible answers. Because of this, sharing stories becomes important as increasing the amount of narratives in the world increases nuances in our vocabularies and understandings. In the novel Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, the quote “Survival is insufficient” runs through the narrative. This quote highlights the strength of storytelling as the sharing and consumption of experiences is crucial for stimulating something beyond mere survival. Knowing other’s stories provides us with the language and tools required to understanding and processing our reality. 

References

Deutscher, G. (2016). Through the language glass: Why the world looks different in other languages. London: Cornerstone Digital.

Goldstein, E. B. (2015). Cognitive psychology: Connecting mind, research, and everyday experience (4th ed.). Stamford, CT: Cengage Learning.

Haidt, J. (2013). The righteous mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion. New York: Vintage Books.

Johnson-Laird, P. N. (1983). Mental models. Cambridge, MA: Univ. Pr.

Mandel, E. S., & Chergé, G. D. (2018). Station Eleven. Montpellier: Éditions Gabelire.