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Linguistic Diversity, Equity And Health: ‘Do You Speak Covid-19?’, Laila C.A. Helmi

BAU Journal - Society, Culture and Human Behavior

With many languages of the world becoming marginalized, discriminated against and at times even facing extinction, the linguistic landscape of the medical and health-care context suffers many challenges. Most prominently, when medical / health staff and their patients do not speak the same language, health-care disparities arise. With COVID-19 sweeping through the world, language barriers multiplied, access to information became a privilege conditional upon competence in English or one of the major world languages, people’s perception of the pandemic became confused and health care was adversely affected. This paper attempts a review of some of the research conducted on the …