COVID-19 crosslinguistic and multimodal public health communication strategies: Social justice or emergency political strategy?

The current paper explores crosslinguistic and multimodal health communication strategies employed by the South African government during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020-2022. Some governments used multiple languages, yet in most cases, English monolingualism was a predominant form of communication. This paper utilised a multimodal critical discourse analysis to explore public health communication by government officials in South Africa and by members of the National Coronavirus Command Council mandated to combat the spread of COVID-19 in South Africa. The paper interrogates how this language and messaging limited or enabled linguistic equity and social justice. The paper concludes that in a country such as South Africa, for any government’s initiative to promote linguistic and social justice, it ought to be ‘languaged’ and messaged through the linguistic repertoires that the majority of its citizens understand; if not, it is doomed to fail as was the case with the South African government’s COVID-19 communication strategies.