Covid-19 vaccination campaigns for diverse language groups in Pennsylvania/USA and Western Cape/South Africa

Examples from national and sub-national levels

Bibliographic Data

ID22872362
AuthorsJessica G Cox (Department of Spanish and Linguistics, Franklin and Marshall College , Lancaster, Pennsylvania), Michael M Kretzer (0000-0002-8603-0141, African Language Studies Department, University of the Western Cape (UWC) , Cape Town)
Year2025
Publication date2025-08-09
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueApplied Linguistics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0142-6001 • E-ISSN: 1477-450X
PublisherOxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1093/applin/amae082
OpenAlexW4413185221
LanguageEN
References cited18

Various health departments worldwide needed to react to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic: first, conveying information about the virus itself, and later, announcing and promoting vaccinations. Multilingual, multimodal communication is essential during a crisis. Studies from early in the pandemic show some positive efforts and shortfalls in language inclusivity. We build on these to study COVID-19 communications with a later issue, vaccination, in South Africa and the United States. Analysis of online resources available from national government websites and one sub-national government from each country (Western Cape and Pennsylvania) followed O’Brien et al.’s (2018) framework of availability, accessibility, acceptability, and adaptability. Both countries only partly implemented their language policies and the number of English resources available exceeded that of other languages. Also, both countries had multimodal resources. Although there were resources in non-majority languages, they offered only isolated materials in less populous minority, indigenous, and migrant languages. The use of automatic translation or professional translators affected acceptability. Websites varied in the accessibility or ease of finding materials in languages other than English.

2019-20 coronavirus outbreak · Archaeology · Cape · Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) · Geography · Infectious disease (medical specialty) · Outbreak · Political science · Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) · Vaccination · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies · Interpreting and Communication in Healthcare · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Medicine · Virology

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