2020 – Webinar

2020 – Webinar

EFNIL Webinar: Language in the corona crisis
30 September and 1 October 2020

Programme

With the appearance of the Corona virus and Covid 19, many Europeans became aware of the word pandemic as a description of a disease, which at first may have looked like just another virus infection, but which turned out to be a whole new kind of threat. 

How do you talk about such a phenomenon? What are the linguistic means by which it can be meaningfully expressed? Interpretations of such a phenomenon are set and negotiated in public discourse. The result of these interactions is reflected not least in changes in vocabulary. Such changes obviously depend on the intentions of those involved, but there are also practices and specific options that have to do with structural traits and discourse traditions in individual languages.

These changes in vocabulary and their capture and description by linguistics and lexicography will be the subject of the session on “Corona and the Lexicon”. Speakers from three European language communities – and representatives of national language institutions that are members of EFNIL – will give talks on the relative situation within their language, Croatian, Dutch and German so laying a basis for a discussion of this topic.

Frieda Steurs: The Dutch Language is Coronaproof

The start will be made by Frieda Steur from the Instituut voor de Nederlandse taal (INT). She will talk about the variable and successful ways the Dutch language community is dealing with the language challenges of the corona crisis. Both Flanders and the Netherlands went into lockdown in the middle of March, and “telecommuting” or telework from home became the new standard. The Dutch language institute was well prepared for such a situation with an excellent IT infrastructure in place and robust servers that allowed the colleagues to access the data and algorithms from home. We had ZOOM-meetings, MS-teams, Skypecalls, and e-aperitifs at the end of the week.

We closely monitored the new language data that were processed every week, and identified loads of neologisms related to Covid-19. This resulted in different publications and a full fledged ‘Coronadictionary’ with more than 1000 entries. In my talk, I will present some of the work we did, and also the impact of the crisis on the Dutch language in general. At the same time, digital language material is more wanted than ever before, as e-learning becomes more and more popular for all levels of education.

Carolin Müller-Spitzer / Sascha Wolfer: Recent developments in German online press in the face of the coronavirus crisis

As second speakers Carolin Müller-Spitzer and Sascha Wolfer from the Leibniz Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS) will present the use of the cOWIDplus resources for analysing the change of discourses in times of Corona. The coronavirus pandemic dominates the news on a large scale. In our talk we want to show three inter-connected resources that are designed to capture and illustrate these effects on a subset of the German language: An RSS corpus of German-language, a continuously updated HTML page tracking the diversity of the vocabulary in the RSS corpus (cOWIDplus Analyse) and a Shiny web application that enables other researchers and the broader public to explore the corpus in terms of basic frequencies (cOWIDplus Viewer). We show, how weekly overviews of the most frequently used words show the point in time when the corona pandemic becomes the dominant topic in news reports; how a veritable explosion of word formation products with ‘corona’ such as ‘pre-corona society’ or ‘post-corona future’ can be observed; how other topics – e.g. football – are suppressed by the coronavirus crisis; how the discussion about ways out of the lockdown is reflected in the data; and how prominent virologists are entering the same ‘frequency league’ as politicians.

Kristina Despot and Zeijko Josic: How Coronavirus Infected our Language (and Thought)

In the third talk Kristina Despot and Zeijko Josic from the Institute of Croatian Language and Linguistics will discuss changes in the Croatian language brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic the lexical and the conceptual level.

On the lexical level, many neologisms that have spread extremely fast thanks to social networks. The new reality also caused the appearance of new collocations and phrases, changes in meaning of existing words, and the borrowing of medical jargon into general language. We will give an overview of the content of a dictionary on the vocabulary related to the coronavirus and the COVID-19 disease developed at our Institute.

On the conceptual level, the metaphorical framing of the coronavirus discourse will be discussed, especially the metaphor of war that dominates public discourse. The discourse in the media as well as in general public is dominated in all languages by the conceptualization of the virus as an enemy, and of the prevention of its spread as a fight or war against a dangerous invisible enemy, which must be defeated as soon as possible. Based on the results of the analysis of a specially compiled corpus of Croatian (and English) texts two questions will be answered: 1) Why is the metaphor of war so dominant? 2) Is a re-conceptualization possible and how would a different framing change the way the public sees and understands this situation?

14:00 – 16:00 The Lexicon used in the Corona Discourse