The coronavirus pandemic is changing many aspects of our lives: how we work, how we socialize, how we shop. It is even affecting the language that we use and how we communicate. We have all had to learn new terminology to discuss the virus, and this terminology has become commonplace. We have also created new words to express coronavirus-related ideas, or repurposed old words to make them relevant to the current situation. It is quite interesting to see the progression of language in this way.

Five or six months ago, the phrase “social distancing” was barely known, and was just starting to be introduced. Every time a news anchor mentioned it, they had to explain its meaning, maybe even show a little diagram to illustrate the concept. Now, unless you’ve been living under a rock, you hear anyone and everyone talking about “social distancing” several times a day. The same is true for other COVID-19 related terminology, including phrases like “flatten the curve.”

People are endlessly creative, even during pandemics. This is seen in the fact that people across the world are coming up with new words to express new concepts that have emerged due to coronavirus. One of the most popular examples of this in English is the word “covidiot” (“covid” + “idiot”) which describes people who willingly don’t follow the guidelines around COVID-19 to protect themselves and others. This is a fun list that gives some more examples of new and repurposed words in many different languages.

The COVID-19 guidelines that we are following might also change how we actually speak. We are wearing masks when we go outside and staying at least six feet away from people we encounter. Both of these practices protect our health, but also make it much more difficult to talk and hear each other. Sometimes we end up almost yelling just to have a brief conversation. For some of us, the difficulties of having an in-person communication make us weigh our words more carefully and focus on communicating as efficiently as possible- we don’t want to spend energy yelling about things that don’t matter!

As always, it is important to consider people who communicate differently than us, and do what we can to help them. One group of people facing particularly difficult communication challenges now is the deaf and hard-of-hearing community. Many of them rely on lip reading and seeing facial expressions to understand others, and with masks, this is now impossible. People have designed and started creating masks with clear plastic windows in them to allow for lip reading; there are several places now to purchase such masks online, or you can make your own by following a guide like this.

As professionals in the language industry, we at Monterey Language Services are fascinated by how this pandemic is changing our language and communication styles. We like to stay on top of these changes so that we can continue communicating as effectively as possible!