not helpful, 10 especially to elderly people in her village located in Tibetan regions of western Sichuan province. The community effort to translate the message into the local languages helped significantly in conveying the precautionary measures needed to arrest the spread of the virus. The second challenge in fighting the pandemic is countering misinformation circulating, inter alia, on social media platforms. In India, this has been a huge challenge as in addition to WhatsApp messages, the sources of misinformation are sometimes the elected members of parliament. 11 In fact, the Union Minister of State for Health and Family Welfare Ashwini Kumar Choubey told reporters that staying in the sun for 10-15 minutes every day could be helpful. 12 Another example of misinformation in India with severe economic consequences is that the virus spreads from poultry. This led to a plunge in the retail price of chickens, 13 which led to cases of suicide among farmers. A related effect of such misinformation was the sudden rise in the price of pulses. Both the misinformation and fake news about the virus can only be dealt with effectively by deploying all linguistic resources to reach out to the people. Whether it is the challenge of disseminating correct information or dealing with the challenges of misinformation or fake news about COVID-19, multilingualism can be used as a resource to reach out to people in languages they understand and trust. Along with other tools such as medical care, clearly language is an important and effective one in our fight against the pandemic. Rizwan Ahmad is an associate professor of sociolinguistics in theDepartment of English Literature & Linguistics at Qatar University. In his research, he studies issues of language and identity, multilingualism, language policy and writing systems. Note: A version of this piece was previously published on the Language on the Move blog on April 14, 2020. It has been published here with express permission from the author. 10 https://www.languageonthemove.com/fighting-the-coronavirus-in-local-languages/ 11 https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/03/misinformation-fake-news-spark-india-coronavirus- fears-200309051731540.html 12 https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/coronavirus-ashwini-kumar-choubey-sunlight-1657436-2020-03-19 13 https://thewire.in/economy/coronavirus-misinformation-poultry-india
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