Language of Covid

For more than two years now, the whole world has been dealing with a globalpandemic: COVID-19, which has infected 476 million people, killing more than 6 million (at time of writing). The pandemic has had massive impacts on households, workplaces, national economies, and much more.

How has this pandemic changed language? And what does the language of Covid — the way we talk about it, ourselves, and the world impacted by it—tell us about language, the world, and ourselves?

In this course, we will introduce and learn about concepts from linguistics, and then use the perspective they give us to examine the way Covid has been discussed over the past two years by politicians, by journalists, and by people in general.