Language matters and Griffith University’s Dr Danielle Heinrichs’ research is about helping people to think about language in new and different ways which is crucial during crisis or disasters.
Dr Heinrichs has been investigating the multilingual practices of governments communicating about significant health matters including the COVID-19 pandemic.
Her interest in how multilingual health communication occurs was sparked by the COVID-19 pandemic and associated restrictions which meant she had to shift her research focus during her Ph.D.
She explored the online language ecology of COVID-19 health communication on government websites and government social media sites because of their important role in providing information.
Along with some of her colleagues she has looked at government language services policies with a view to changing rigid policies so that official communication about health can be more responsive to emerging crises.
“We looked at the Victorian and Northern Territory, government, Facebook pages and websites. We were looking at those sites and comparing them to the language services policies in those states and territories and looking at who the language advocate was and how they were reconfigured,” Dr Heinrichs said.
“We also looked at some of the ways in which non-certified people were sharing information in ways much more nuanced than a lot more than what policy allows. The government were putting this on their own pages, but their own policy said, ‘Don’t do that’.”
Dr Heinrichs said it would good if the flexibility some governments showed in communicating with non-native English speakers during the first stages of COVID-19 continued so that people could feel confident and validated using their languages in ways that they felt were reflective of their needs.
She hopes that her findings will result in changes to policy with benefits for the communities involved in her work.
Her research is about also about reducing discrimination towards people who have non-English accents.
Dr Heinrichs works with educators to change the way languages are thought about and taught in schools.
“When I talk about changing attitudes towards language in our language classrooms, I think there are bigger impacts. We’re not just trying to get kids to be able to say more in Spanish, for example, but we’re getting them to think about language differently,” she said.
“So, if in a Spanish language class, we can get kids to kids to be more accepting of people who sound different in different languages, then hopefully, they’ll think about that in relation to English as well and be more accepting of people in all different scenarios.
“We know that within, for example, the workplace, people get discriminated against because of accent, and things like that. So hopefully, there’ll be an impact in the broader society.”
Dr Heinrichs is interested in disrupting valid practices based on native speakers.
“I am really interested in how we can do things differently, how we can interrupt the idea of native speaker ism, the idea of using language perfectly and policing the language that we need to use.”
Her latest publications include:
DH Heinrichs, MM Kretzer, EE Davis (2022) Mapping the online language ecology of multilingual COVID-19 public health information in Australia, European Journal of Language Policy, 14 (2), 133-162.
You can access her recent conference presentations on her work on multilingual communication and COVID-19 here:
