Linguistic Coinage during COVID-19 Pandemic: Health Care Terminology

Abstract

During the ongoing novel Coronavirus disease, everything is paralyzed and shut down except for the world languages that continue to grow and thrive, especially in the field of health care with the circulation of terms and combinations specific to the context of the pandemic. This paper is an overview of the linguistic evolution that has affected the English lexicography in the time of COVID-19 outbreak. It reflects specifically the linguistic impact of the pandemic on international health care discourse and the pandemic management guidelines released by public health organisms and authorities. It concludes with a conviction that telecommunication and telepresence technologies have played a pivotal role in distributing health care information and circulating medical terminology. Moreover, most of the terms have been coined during previous disasters and have been updated to affect not only health discourse, but also other disciplines worldwide. In fact, health care terminology has been globally dominating social and political discourses, and affecting laymen parlance with linguistic behavior (re)used repeatedly to report the new conditions in which the world is currently living. This paper is a contribution that reveals how languages can be vulnerable to social change and novel trends.