Languages and symbols in communicating Covid-19 in Sardinia

Alice Guerrieri

2022-01-01

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Abstract

The spread of the Covid-19 worldwide has unleashed a communicative tsunami oriented on the metaphorical frame “The virus is a war to fight” with its bulletin of “military” languages. Often, throughout history, society has preferred this narration to explain global pandemics such as HIV (Sontag 1989) and to talk about the most serious diseases, charging the sick and their family with a psychological and intolerable burden. World leaders during the pandemic invoked wartime metaphors to communicate the seriousness of the problem. According to the linguist John Baugh (Washington University in St. Louis), when politicians and health officials invoke this language, it’s often because «they feel that the public has not yet taken the problem seriously» (The Atlantic, 31/3/2020). But this imagery can damage communication and provoke misbehavior between people. Is it possible to promote language as an antidote? In this paper I want to analyze the languages (textual and visual) collected during the pandemic “waves” in order to explore the metaphorical construction of narratives, then detect the alternatives to war metaphors for Covid-19 and the counter-narratives that strengthen the sense of identity in Sardinia. In conclusion, the data reveal that new perspectives are possible to safeguard words and images necessary after the emergency (Medium, 20/3/2020).