There are two major linguistic challenges in containing the spread of the virus. The first is the dissemination of information about preventive measures to all people in their own languages, i.e., mother tongues. The second is countering misinformation about its spread and prevention. The presence of multiple languages within a country could create a communication barrier with devastating consequences for the country as a whole. Many minority groups within a country may not have a good command of the official language and therefore may misunderstand the message in the official language. Hygiene and health information must therefore be made available in all major languages. Qatar, with a population of only 2.6 million, is linguistically an extremely diverse country because Arabic-speaking Qatari citizens constitute only about 10% of the population. The remaining 90% come from many countries, including a large number from India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, the Philippines and Pakistan. The official language of Qatar is Arabic, but English is widely used. A large part of the expatriate population consists of people engaged in blue-collar jobs and who do not know Arabic or English. The communication of health information therefore is quite a challenge. In addition to Arabic and English, Qatar’s Ministry of Public Health made the decision to create handouts and posters in Bangla, Urdu, Hindi, Tagalog, Tamil, Nepalese, Sinhalese, and Malayalam. 9 These handouts are available on the ministry website and social media platforms such as Twitter. Related to the language barrier is the issue of literacy. Many workers from South Asia are either illiterate or semi-literate and therefore an alternative media that they can understand was needed. In addition to the written posters, the ministry also made the message available in video format in the above-mentioned languages of the expatriates. Although a study is needed to assess how effective these measures were, there is hardly any doubt that the government made serious efforts to use multilingual resources to reach out to different language groups living in Qatar. The availability of information in the languages of the people has another positive aspect. It increases the chances of acceptance of the message. Dr. Yu Lha has shown that health information available in Chinese was
9 https://www.moph.gov.qa/arabic/Pages/covid19videos.aspx
31
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online