Swift Variation during the Pandemic: A Cognitive Sociolinguistic Perspective of Semantic Adaptations
Dr. Thapasya Jayaraj, Central University of Kerala
The paper demonstrates how an unfamiliar, globally affected social issue like the present pandemic immediately affects languages and results in language variation using the existing framework of cognitive sociolinguistics (Geeraerts, 2005; Geeraerts, Kristiansen & Peirsman, 2010; Zenner, Speelman & Geeraerts, 2010; Labov, 2011; Zenner et al., 2012; Pütz, Robinson & Reif, 2014; Hollmann, 2017). The recent COVID-19 outbreak has resulted in using many new words and phrases especially, in the daily discourses in English. The universality of the English language and borrowings from English to other languages has become an inevitable process during this period. Similarly, some of the less common words that already existed, in general, gained attention and usage. Language variation is viewed as a gradual, slow and systematic process (Chambers, Trudgill & Schilling, 2013; Labov, 1972; 2001; 2011); the present scenario is diverging by a ‘swift variation’ as these expressions spread globally as the virus irrespective of the language. Therefore, observing language variations in progress due to a social phenomenon like this, gains momentum. Thus, the paper explores the sociocognitive aspects of linguistic adaptations during the pandemic, especially by obtaining evidence of variations in discourses and their semantic adaptations in Malayalam1 language. The analysis progresses along with the qualitative and quantitative analysis of linguistic additions and borrowings from the pandemic code and their further semantic adaptations. Malayalam also follows the global phenomenon of incorporating a lot of borrowed expressions from English (Devy, 2015). The paper develops on the analysis of the semantic familiarity of the speakers with the corpus created from the pandemic code. The 70 informants are from various age groups ranging from 15 to 85, who cannot understand or speak English beyond word level. The study employed digital cue cards containing the expressions in their contexts written with the Malayalam writing system. All the possible semantic associations of each item in the corpus made by every speaker were recorded and analysed further. Apart from the apparent assimilations, the factors of analysis include the following: i) familiarity index (which includes checking multiple attributions of an expression), ii) semantic adaptation and, iii) other semantic attributions and iv) semantic extensions. The study explores the pandemic linguistic expressions, which elevated as a universal pandemic code, by comparing its impact on various languages spoken in India, including Tamil2 and Hindi, along with Malayalam. These current variations in these languages observed to have a similar pattern that creates a swift language variation, unlike the previously explored language variations, which had a slow and gradual pace. It further identifies the existence of two categories of expressions based on the discourse patterns; a) Familiar Expressions that are adapted in daily discourses (e.g.: mask, quarantine, containment, lockdown, among others.) and b) Less familiar expressions (pandemic, community spread, flatten the curve, among others) that chiefly present among the older generation than the younger age groups. The more familiar words are observed to be undergoing a semantic extension in the daily discourses. On the other hand, some of the familiar words are observed to be semantically narrowed with one single attribution also. The paper tries to shows how a cognitive sociolinguistic analysis helps to theoretically explain a new dichotomy of ‘slow’ versus ‘swift’ variations in languages. It also contributes to understand the sociocognitive processes resulting in a swift language variation in progress in response to an emergency phenomenon like the pandemic.
1Malayalam i s a Dravidian language spoken in the state of Kerala, India
2Tamil is a Dravidian language that is known for creating new words in their native linguistic environment after borrowing the concept rather than the lexical item itself. For example, the word en̪d̪iɾan ‘robot’ is a recent addition to their lexicon.
Keywords: Pandemic code, semantic adaptation, Malayalam, language variation, swift variation, borrowing, cognitive sociolinguistics
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