A Semantic Analysis of Corona Virus Pandemic Terms

Abstract

Various epidemics in recent years have introduced myriad of challenges to the entire world. COVID-19 disease is the latest crisis with its attendant health and language issues. With its emergence, COVID-19 introduced into the global linguistic repertoire an avalanche of unknown vocabulary to the ordinary language user. In today’s world, language is not only available for communication; it is a tool that contributes to maintaining global peace and order. In bridging diverse communities of humanities in the world, shared meaning becomes a platform for mutual understanding, promoting intellectual development and collaborative research efforts. The current study aims to explore and explicate the novel language of COVID-19, thereby making meaning accessible for clarity of communication. The qualitative method of analysis which relied on secondary data from different online COVID-19 glossaries was utilised. Data collection was a total of 149 terms, out of which 34 were purposively selected for analysis. This was to examine their semantic meaning and also ascertain their word relations. The study investigates the process of developing meaning mechanisms in the use COVID-19 terms among language users. The study found that the COVID-19 has a distinct vocabulary that can be analysed linguistically. The literature review in this study highlighted past researches on COVID-19 as descriptive, others on the frequency count of words and the etymology of terms.