Documentary linguists and risk communication: views from the virALLanguages project experience

Di Carlo, Pierpaolo; Lukschy, Leonore; Rey, Sydney; Vita, Vasiliki

Abstract

Abstract Linguists are seldom, if ever, engaged in work aimed at communicating risk to the general public. The COVID-19 global pandemic and its associated infodemic may change this state of affairs, at least for documentary linguists. Documenting languages may bring researchers in direct contact with communities speaking minority or marginalized languages and gain key insights into their communicative ecologies. By being both immersed in local networks and more or less knowledgeable about the community’s communicative habits, documentary linguists appear to be placed in a unique position to contribute to communicating risk in ways that are better tailored to the community and, therefore, potentially quite effective locally. Furthermore, adding work in risk communication to their agenda may also stimulate documentary linguists to find new models for “giving back” to the communities they work with. In order to provide a concrete example of how all this may play out in concrete terms, we illustrate the virALLanguages project.

Citation

Di Carlo, P., Lukschy, L., Rey, S., & Vita, V. (online). Documentary linguists and risk communication: views from the virALLanguages project experience. Linguistics Vanguard: A Multimodal Journal for the Language Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2021-0021

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Online Publication Date: Mar 10, 2022
• Deposit Date: Mar 29, 2022
• Journal: Linguistics Vanguard: A Multimodal Journal for the Language Sciences
• Electronic ISSN: 2199-174X
• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2021-0021
• Keywords: Linguistics and Language, Language and Linguistics