Preliminary Findings of an Analysis of the COVID-19 English Terminology Used in Electronic News Media in Sri Lanka

Abstract

COVID-19 outbreak has brought several language changes mainly in terminology. Some existing analyses on English lexicon usage during the pandemic highlight the frequent use of words which were infrequent before the pandemic and also new coinage. We used a corpus approach to conduct a preliminary analysis of COVID-19 related vocabulary used in electronic news media in Sri Lanka and identified that some health-related terminology used in many other contexts can also be seen in the Sri Lankan context. Apart from that, some localized COVID-19 related terminology has been found in the corpus. The collocation analysis of the words Coronavirus and COVID-19 shows that Coronavirus is used as a noun and a noun modifier while COVID 19 is mostly used as a noun modifier in the corpus.COVID-19 outbreak has brought several language changes mainly in terminology. Some existing analyses on English lexicon usage during the pandemic highlight the frequent use of words which were infrequent before the pandemic and also new coinage. We used a corpus approach to conduct a preliminary analysis of COVID-19 related vocabulary used in electronic news media in Sri Lanka and identified that some health-related terminology used in many other contexts can also be seen in the Sri Lankan context. Apart from that, some localized COVID-19 related terminology has been found in the corpus. The collocation analysis of the words Coronavirus and COVID-19 shows that Coronavirus is used as a noun and a noun modifier while COVID 19 is mostly used as a noun modifier in the corpus.