Language in a pandemic: A multimodal analysis of social media representation of COVID-19

Since COVID-19 was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization on 11 March 2020, it has become a source of worry across countries within the global space. It has posed not only a health challenge but also an economic and a linguistic burden. Linguistic burden because many efforts are being made by stakeholders to appropriately represent or codify the manifestations of the disease in unambiguous and understandable terms. Hence, one of the major platforms where COVID-19 has been variously represented is the social media. This study, therefore, focuses on a multimodal analysis of the representation of the COVID-19 pandemic on two social media platforms: Facebook and WhatsApp. The study adopts Kress’s social semiotic model as theoretical framework. This model explains the meaning affordances of verbal and non-verbal semiotic resources. It examines communicators’ intentions and makes meanings through multiple semiotic modes. This model is adopted because it offers a sociological perspective to the interpretation of visual texts. Twenty-five semiotic resources comprising memes and flash headlines, which were purposively sourced from Facebook and WhatsApp over a period of twelve weeks between April and July 2020, were analysed in the study. The data were subjected to both pictorial and simple descriptive linguistic analysis. The study reveals that COVID-19 memes extend economic and social concerns in Nigeria. The semiotic resources expose social problems such as poverty, insecurity and inequality in the Nigerian society which pose a threat to strict adherence to safety measures; and establish the manifestation of religion and gender issues in COVID-19 debates. Furthermore, it provides informative-cum-instructional functions in the fight against COVID-19. The study suggests that the deployment of appropriate linguistic and extralinguistic codes could guarantee effective and targeted public health enlightenment on COVID-19.